Abstracting Conceptual Models as a Weakening Process

Proc. of the 31st Int. Workshop on Logic, Language, Information and Computation (WoLLIC). Volume 15942 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 2025.

Utilizing abstractions of large conceptual models may enhance their clarity and comprehensibility. This work assesses an existing algorithm for generating abstractions of ontology-driven conceptual models. Although the algorithm has been empirically evaluated using the FAIR catalog of such models, it still lacks formal semantics. This paper addresses this gap by formalizing the basic transformations underlying the abstraction process in SROIQ---the expressive and decidable description logic that underpins the Web Ontology Language (OWL 2). Specifically, it demonstrates that, under certain natural assumptions, these transformations are obtained by a formal procedure known as axiom weakening.

@inproceedings{WoLLIC-2025,
   title = "Abstracting Conceptual Models as a Weakening Process",
   year = "2025",
   author = "Elena Romanenko and Oliver Kutz and Diego Calvanese and
Giancarlo Guizzardi",
   booktitle = "Proc. of the 31st Int. Workshop on Logic, Language,
Information and Computation (WoLLIC)",
   volume = "15942",
   publisher = "Springer",
   series = "Lecture Notes in Computer Science",
}