EXISTENTIAL DEPENDENCY DRIVEN APPROACH FOR EXTRACTING VIEWS FROM DOMAIN ONTOLOGY Soraya Setti Ahmed 1 , Mimoun Malki 2 and Sidi Mohamed Benslimane 2 1 Mascara University, Department of Computer Science, Mascara, Algeria 2 Djillali Liabes University, Research Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, Sidi Bel Abbes, Algeria settisoraya@yahoo.fr, {malki, benslimane}@univ-sba.dz Keywords: Modularization, Existential dependency, Reverse engineering, Ontology views, GM foundational ontology. Abstract: Designing ontologies in modular way is generally considered as a good practice. The goal of ontology modularization is to obtain a module or a set of modules from an ontology, which fit the requirements of a particular application or a particular scenario. In this paper we describe an approach for extracting ontology views using existential dependency (ED) from OWL domain ontology. The first step of our approach consists of transforming OWL file ontology to UML class diagram by reverse engineering process. The next step is transformation of UML class diagram to the G-M foundational ontology relations (which has been represented in UML as profile) enriched with existential dependency. The extraction process based on ED could provide a coherent fragment of an ontology parts together with transitive closure of dependant parts. 1 INTRODUCTION Ontology modularization is described as the activity of identifying one or more modules in ontology with the purpose of supporting reuse or maintenance. The ability to identify such modules, thus potentially reducing the size or complexity of an ontology for a given task or set of concepts is increasingly important in the Semantic Web as domain ontologies increase in terms of size, complexity and expressivity (Doran et al., 2009). In conceptual modelling, the Foundational Ontology is needed as domain independent theoretical basis to guide and validate models of particular domains, as using of right modelling concepts and rules is making a great influence on the quality of Information Systems (Rajugan et al., 2006). For such purpose, the transformations between conceptual models (expressed, for example, in UML) and ontological models, expressed in ontological languages (for example, OWL) are needed. The contribution of this paper is to describe an approach for extracting views from domain ontology. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 discusses the concepts and issues related to ontology modularization. Section 3 reviews the existing approaches for ontology modularization. In section 4 we present our approach for ontology views extraction. In section 5 the main process of our architecture are discussed. Finally, we conclude this paper and outline our future work in section 6. 2 ONTOLOGY MODULARIZATION Ontology modularization (Doran et al., 2007) refers to the process of fragmenting existing ontologies into a set of smaller, and possibly interconnected parts, or modules. The reasons for modularizing can be different and range from ontology reuse in order to support the work of ontology engineers (Doran et al., 2007) to information integration (Cuenca et al., 2006) or to support efficient agent communication (Cuenca et al., 2005). These approaches differ significantly in terms of the concrete goal of the modularization (scalability, reuse, Understandability, Personalization, etc.) and consequently in terms of the criteria (Connectedness of Modules, Size and Number of Modules, Redundancy of Representation, etc.) used to determine a good modularization. Next section reviews the different approaches for modularizing ontologies. 413