We present a method for extracting general modules for ontologies formulated in the description logic ALC. A module for an ontology is an ideally substantially smaller ontology that preserves all entailments for a user-specified set of terms. As such, it has applications such as ontology reuse and ontology analysis. Different from classical modules, general modules may use axioms not explicitly present in the input ontology, which allows for additional conciseness. So far, general modules have only been investigated for lightweight description logics. We present the first work that considers the more expressive description logic ALC. In particular, our contribution is a new method based on uniform interpolation supported by some new theoretical results. Our evaluation indicates that our general modules are often smaller than classical modules and uniform interpolants computed by the state-of-the-art, and compared with uniform interpolants, can be computed in a significantly shorter time. Moreover, our method can be used for, and in fact improves, the computation of uniform interpolants and classical modules.

翻译：我们提出一种用于提取描述逻辑ALC中本体论通用模块的方法。本体论的模块是指一个理想情况下显著更小的本体，它能保留用户指定术语集的所有蕴含关系。因此，该方法可应用于本体论重用与分析。与经典模块不同，通用模块可能使用输入本体中未明确存在的公理，从而进一步提升简洁性。此前，通用模块仅针对轻量级描述逻辑进行了研究。本文首次考虑了更具表达力的描述逻辑ALC。具体而言，我们的贡献是基于均匀插值的新方法，并辅以若干新的理论成果。实验评估表明，我们的通用模块通常比经典模块更小，且与现有最优方法计算的均匀插值相比，可显著缩短计算时间。此外，我们的方法还可用于（并实际改进了）均匀插值与经典模块的计算。