An empirical comparison of scalable part–whole ontology engineering patterns

Abstract: To enhance aerospace applications such as supply chain management or maintenance tracking and reliability assessment, aircraft manufacturers need to enrich their electronic documentation systems with better conceptualizations of the aerospace domain. Because of the number and diversity of products and parts in an aircraft, ontologies to model this domain can potentially be very large. Therefore, it is critical to have scalable ontology generation approaches, along with an understanding of how the design of these ontologies has an impact on the performance of description logic reasoners that can operate over them. In this paper, we investigate how to achieve this goal though the application of best practice ontology engineering patterns. In particular, we examine two types of ontology engineering patterns used to instantiate large-scale ontologies based on part–whole relations. The first approach is a direct implementation of the part–whole guidelines published by W3C. The second approach uses right-identity axioms supported by the EL+ description logic. The results of our empirical evaluation show the benefits of the latter approach, whereby the CEL reasoner is able to perform the task of classification over large ontologies significantly faster than the description logic reasoners FaCT++, RACER and Pellet that operate over comparable ontologies designed using the W3C pattern.