A Flexible Partitioning Tool for Large Ontologies

The benefits of modular ontologies in terms of easier creation and maintenance as well as better computational properties have been recognized by different researchers. As most real world ontologies, however, are still designed in a monolithic way, there is a need for methods that partition an existing ontology into a set of modules. Currently, existing work suffers from the fact that the notion of modularization is not as well understood in the context of ontologies as it is in software engineering. In this paper we present a flexible partitioning tool for large ontologies that can be adapted to the needs of different applications based on criteria that the resulting modular ontology should satisfy.