Abstract
<p>Efficiently extracting a module from a given ontology that captures
all the ontology's knowledge about a set of specified terms is
well-understood task. It can be solved, for instance, by locality-based
modules. In contrast, extracting <em>all</em> modules of an ontology
is computationally difficult because there can be exponentially many.
However, it is reasonable to assume that, by revealing the modular
structure of an ontology, we can obtain information about its topicality,
connectedness, structure, superfluous parts, or agreement between
actual and intended modeling. Furthermore, incremental reasoning
makes use of a number of, although not all possible, modules of an
ontology. Chances are that real-life ontologies have significantly
fewer modules than the worst cases. We report on experiments to obtain
or estimate this number and to evaluate the modular structure of
an ontology where we succeeded to compute it. In that evaluation,
we look at the number and sizes of the modules, as well as the relation
between module sizes and number and sizes of signatures that lead
to the module.</p>
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