An Algebra of Lightweight Ontologies

TL;DR

This paper introduces an algebraic framework for lightweight ontologies, enabling systematic creation, comparison, and reuse of ontologies through defined operations, with a practical Protégé plugin implementation.

Contribution

It presents a novel algebraic approach to lightweight ontologies, including operations for ontology manipulation and a Protégé plugin implementation.

Findings

Operations facilitate ontology reuse and comparison.

Framework helps design mediated schemas.

Implementation supports practical ontology engineering.

Abstract

This paper argues that certain ontology design problems are profitably addressed by treating ontologies as theories and by defining a set of operations that create new ontologies, including their constraints, out of other ontologies. The paper first shows how to use the operations in the context of ontology reuse, how to take advantage of the operations to compare different ontologies, or different versions of an ontology, and how the operations may help design mediated schemas in a bottom up fashion. The core of the paper discusses how to compute the operations for lightweight ontologies and addresses the question of minimizing the set of constraints of a lightweight ontology. Finally, the paper describes an implementation of the operations, as a Prot\'eg\'e plug-in.