Towards Automatic Partitioning of Class Hierarchies

The increasing awareness of the benefits of ontologies for information processing has lead to the creation of a number of large ontologies about real world domains. The size of these ontologies and their monolithic character cause serious problems in handling them. In other areas, e.g. software engineering, these problems are tackled by partitioning monolithic entities into sets of meaningful and mostly self-contained modules. In this paper, we suggest a similar approach for ontologies. We propose propose an approach for automatically partitioning large ontologies into smaller modules based on the structure of the class hierarchy. The method is demonstrated on a part of the UMLS semantic network. Experiments with larger ontologies are available online at http://swserver.cs.vu.nl/partitioning/