Incrementally Updateable and Persistent Decomposition of OWL Ontologies

The paper focuses on practical aspects of decomposing OWL ontologies into logically coherent fragments, called atoms, and maintaining large ontologies in the decomposed form. While the recently proposed atomic decomposition exhibits some very attractive formal properties and promises important applications, e.g., module extraction, its practical applicability has been far from clear. Two particular concerns are the necessity to recompute the decomposition upon every change to the logical content of the ontology and the lack of methods for managing the decomposed structure in a persistent storage. This paper describes tools which addresses both issues: an algorithm for incremental updates to the atomic decomposition (with a preliminary empirical evaluation) and an approach to its persistence in a RDF store or an XML database.