Ontology Views For Collaborative Ontology Development / quote 2 of 2
Ontology views and segmentation
..the ontology view might be the set of terms and definitions within a certain radius of a selected term, a set which does not itself constitute an ontology but a connected sub-graph (Noy, 2004; Voltz, 2003). The term ‘ontology segmentation’ has been coined to describe the extraction of a subset of an ontology (Seidenberg and Rector, 2006). An ontology view must account for the knowledge representation scheme used to define the ontology: it is necessary to know which elements are classes, instances, relations or quantifiers as these must be treated appropriately. The terms and relations should also be connected – in contrast with database views which need not result in a set of connected elements. The motivation for computing ontology views is similar to that for database views: extracting a smaller subgraph of terms from larger structure should improve the efficiency of automated querying and reasoning, as well as aid human comprehension and discussion.