Evaluation of Extraction Techniques for Ontology Excerpts

ABSTRACT. In this paper we introduce the notion of an ontology excerpt as being a fixed-size subset of an ontology that preserves as much as possible of the meaning of the terms in a given signature as described in the ontology. We consider different extraction techniques for ontology excerpts based on methods from information retrieval. To evaluate these techniques we measure the degree of incompleteness of the resulting excerpts using the notion of logical difference. As such a measure we use the number of concept names from an input signature that witness the logical concept difference between the ontology and its excerpt. We provide an experimental evaluation of the extraction techniques using the biomedicalal ontology SNOMED CT.