Reverse Engineering Process for Extracting Views from Domain Ontology

Abstract. Ontology Modularization is one of the techniques that bear good promises of effective help towards scalability in ontology design, use, and management. The development of proper ontological modules should provide a mechanism for packaging coherent sets of concepts, relationships, axioms, and instances, and a means for reusing these sets in new environments, possibly heterogeneous with respect to the environment the modules were first built. The main contribution of this paper is to describe an approach for extracting views from domain ontology using existential dependency (ED) by reverse engineering process. The extraction process based on ED could provide a coherent fragment of ontology parts together with transitive closure of dependant parts. The goal of reverse engineering process is to output a possible conceptual model, which is more readable to extracting the views, on the basis of the code in which the ontology is implemented. Thus, a set of translation rules is used to convert owl ontology in a UML class diagram