Partial and informative common subsumers of concepts collections in description logics

Least Common Subsumers in Description Logics have shown their usefulness for discovering commonalities among all concepts of a collection. Several applications are nevertheless focused on searching for properties shared by significant portions of a collection rather than by the collection as a whole. Actually, this is an issue we faced in a real case scenario that provided initial motivation for this study, namely the process of Core Competence extraction in knowledge intensive companies. The paper defines four reasoning services for the identification of meaningful common subsumers describing partial commonalities in a collection. In particular Common Subsumers adding informative content to the Least Common Subsumer are investigated, with reference to ALN and ELN.