Class expression learning for ontology engineering

While the number of knowledge bases in the Semantic Web increases, the main-tenance and creation of ontology schemata still remain a challenge. In particular creating class expressions constitutes one of the more demanding aspects of ontol-ogy engineering. In this article we describe how to adapt a semi-automatic method for learning OWL class expressions to the ontology engineering use case. Specifically, we describe how to extend an existing learning algorithm for the class learning prob-lem. We perform rigorous performance optimization of the underlying algorithms for providing instant suggestions to the user. We also present two plugins, which use the algorithm, for the popular Protége ́ and OntoWiki ontology editors and provide a preliminary evaluation on real ontologies