Reduce

ROBOT can be used to remove redundant subClassOf axioms:

robot reduce --reasoner ELK \
  --input ribosome.owl \
  --output results/reduced.owl

See reason for details on supported reasoners (EMR is not supported in reduce).

Available options for reduce:

• --preserve-annotated-axioms: if set to true, axioms that have axiom annotations will not be removed, even if found to be redundant (default false).
• --named-classes-only: if set to true, only subclass axioms between named classes will be checked for redundancy. Anonymous class expressions will be ignored (default false).

Warning

Reciprocal subclass axioms (e.g. A SubClassOf B, B SubClassOf A), entailing equivalence between A and B, may be removed by reduce. In this case it is important to assert an equivalence axiom (A EquivalentTo B) using the reason command before running reduce.

Subproperties and property chains

For backwards compatibility reasons, by default subObjectPropertyOf axioms are ignored when evaluating the redundancy of subClassOf axioms. This means that, given the following example:

C SubClassOf P some D
C SubClassOf Q some D
P SubObjectPropertyOf Q

the first subClassOf axiom would by default not be considered redundant and therefore not be removed.

To force the reduce command to factor in subproperties (including property chains) when evaluating redundancy, use the --include-subproperties option:

robot reduce --reasoner ELK \
  --input redundant-over-subproperties.ofn \
  --include-subproperties true \
  --output results/reduced-redundant-over-subproperties.ofn