A Hybrid Method of Indexing Multiple-Inheritance Hierarchies

The problem of efficient processing of the basic operations on ontologies, such as subsumption checking, or finding all subtypes of a given type, becomes of a very high importance. In the paper we present a hybrid approach of organizing multi-hierarchical structures, combining numbering schemes [1], [13] with "gene-based" methods [10], [17]. The proposed method generalizes earlier solutions and inherits advantages of earlier approaches. The obtained structure preserves the feature of incremental changes of the ontology structure. The experiments performed show significant efficiency results in accessing ontology resources for performing processes specific for semantic web.