Discovering Similarity and Dissimilarity Relations for Knowledge Propagation in Web Ontologies

We focus on the problem of predicting missing class memberships and property assertions in Web Ontologies. We start from the assumption that related entities influence each other, and they may be either similar or dissimilar with respect to a given set of properties: the former case is referred to as homophily, and the latter as heterophily. We present an efficient method for predicting missing class and property assertions for a set of individuals within an ontology by: identifying relations that are likely to encode influence relations between individuals (learning phase) and Leveraging such relations for propagating property information across related entities (inference phase). We show that the complexity of both inference and learning is nearly linear in the number of edges in the influence graph, and we provide an empirical evaluation of the proposed method.