Ontology granulation through inductive decision trees
Bart Gajderowicz, Alireza Sadeghian · 2009
The popularity of ontologies for representing the semantics behind many real-world domains has created a growing pool of ontologies on various topics. While different ontologists, experts, and organizations create the vast majority of ontologies, often for closed world systems, their domains frequently overlap in an open world system, such as the Semantic Web. These overlapping ontologies sometimes model similar or matching theories, that may be inconsistent. To assist in the reuse of these ontologies, this paper describes a technique for enriching manually created ontologies by supplementing them with inductively derived rules, and reducing the number of inconsistencies. The derived rules are translated from decision trees created by executing a tree based data mining algorithm with probability measures over the data being modeled. These rules can be used to revise the ontology adding a higher level of granularity, in order to identify possible similarities missed by the original ontologists. We then discuss how this may be applied to ontology matching. We demonstrate the application of our technique by presenting an example, and discuss how various data types may be treated to generalize the semantics of an ontology for an open world system.