Towards summarizing knowledge: Brief ontologies

There are currently two major tendencies in ontology development. The first is typical of specialized knowledge areas such as genetics, biology, medicine, etc., and involves building large ontologies in order to include all the concepts in the knowledge field. In contrast, the second type of ontology development contains fewer concepts, and is more focused on the semantic completeness of concept definitions rather than on the number of concepts. As an innovative solution to both problems, this paper presents an algorithm that permits the extraction of brief ontologies from large ontologies, thus reducing the number of concepts and the semantic complexity of their definitions. In addition, this algorithm has the advantage of being a user-centered tool, capable of automatically building brief ontologies, as exemplified in a case study in the area of environmental science. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.