Ontology Stratification Methods: a Comparative Study

Comparing the importance of axioms in ontologies is an es- sential task in a variety of applications such as ontology repair and in- consistency management. It guides the choice of axioms to remain in the ontology or which should prevail when a conflict arises. While evaluating the importance of an axiom is difficult, there are different approaches to stratify ontologies by criteria that act as proxies for importance. How- ever, there is little work about how these methods are related and their adequacy considering different applications. In this work, we evaluate specificity and modularity-based stratification approaches, and work to- wards understanding how they relate. We compare empirically the result of five stratification methods over a corpus of real-world ontologies. In particular, we investigate correlations between their rankings and their ability to distinguish axioms.