CES Simplifies OWL Class Expressions for Improved Ontology Management

Learning class expressions in OWL often results in complex and difficult-to-interpret representations, hindering effective reasoning and maintenance of ontologies. This complexity can be mitigated by applying theoretically sound simplification principles. Researchers have introduced the Class Expression Simplifier (CES), a novel algorithm designed for the syntactic simplification of class expressions within Description Logics (DL).CES operates by systematically applying rewriting rules to eliminate redundancies and identify simpler, yet logically equivalent, expressions. Its primary goal is to reduce representational complexity and improve human readability without altering the formal semantics or logical entailments of the original expressions. This ensures that the simplified ontologies remain functionally identical but are far more accessible.The effectiveness of CES was evaluated using class expressions derived from two medium-sized ontologies. The results demonstrated measurable improvements in reasoning efficiency and a significant reduction in verbosity. This work contributes to making ontology-driven applications more accessible, maintainable, and scalable, with direct implications for areas such as knowledge graph construction, semantic search, and Web-scale reasoning. CES is available as part of the open-source Python framework OWLAPY.