Modular ontology development and maintenance

Ontologies are used in bio-health, e-science, and Semantic Web applications to capture the meaning of terms. Designing ontologies is a non-trivial task that requires sophisticated tool support. Ontology languages are based on (Description) Logics, and thus this tool support can and must take into account the underlying semantics of an ontology. Recently, various notions of ontology modules have been developed, and algorithms for extracting modules from ontologies have been designed. Clearly, this implies that one should now try to support modular design and re-use of ontologies, and exploit modules for various other ontology engineering tasks such as reasoning, visualisation, analysis, etc. The aim of this PhD project is to analyse the different notions of modularity in ontologies, develop tool support for modular ontology engineering, and investigate the suitability of modularity for various ontology engineering tasks.

Requirements: knowledge of (or willingness to learn about) first order and description logic, logic-based knowledge representation, ontologies; standard software development skills.