Syntactic Compression of Description Logics Terminologies

Description Logics based languages have emerged as the standard knowledge representation scheme for ontology´s. Typically, an ontology formalizes a number of dependent and related concepts in a domain, encompassed as a terminology. Usually, such terminologies are manually defined, which may yield unnecessarily large and complex terminologies, with a number of redundant group of literals among concepts. Simplicity has always been seen as a hallmark of good models, as they lead to faster inference and easier maintenance, compared to complex models. However, it is a hard task to manually convert a large and complex terminology, sometimes with about a hundred concepts definitions, to a simpler one. In this paper, we present an automatic refinement method to compress terminologies. The method relies on ideas of sub tree isomorphism to convert a terminology into a simpler one without changing its semantics. Experimental results show that the proposed method successfully returns more compact terminologies while still maintaining the same set of individuals associated to a concept.