ONTOLOGICAL CONCEPT EXPANSION FOR IMPROVED SIMILARITY MEASURES FOR DESCRIPTION LOGIC

In one embodiment, prior to similarity measure computation, concept expansion is applied to an original ontology to generate an expanded ontology having the original concepts plus one or more pseudo-concepts, wherein at least one original concept is defined using a hierarchy of (possibly transitive) properties. As a result, the similarity measure computation can produce results that are better than those produced using conventional techniques. In one implementation, the similarity measure computation involves combining two similarity results: a first similarity result corresponding to common semantics found in the two concepts and a second similarity result corresponding to dissimilar semantics found in the two concepts.