Elimination of Redundancy in Ontologies

Ontologies may contain redundancy in terms of axioms that logically follow from other axioms and that could be removed for the sake of consolidation and conciseness without changing the overall meaning. In this paper, we investigate methods for removing such redundancy from ontologies. We define notions around redundancy and discuss typical cases of redundancy and their relation to ontology engineering and evolution. We provide methods to compute irredundant ontologies both indirectly by calculating justifications, and directly by utilising a hitting set tree algorithm and module extraction techniques for optimization. Moreover, we report on experimental results on removing redundancy from existing ontologies available on the Web.