Abstract

The paper proposes a method of normalizing OWL 2 DL ontologies. The method introduces rules aimed at refactoring OWL 2 constructs. The proposed transformations only use a subset of OWL 2 constructs and enable to present an input OWL 2 ontology in a new but semantically equivalent form. The normalization is motivated by the fact that normalized OWL 2 DL ontologies have a unified structure of axioms so that they can be compared in an algorithmic way.