Ontology as a Service (OaaS): extending sub‐ontologies on the cloud

Summary In this paper, we introduce a new notion of Ontology as a Service, in which the ontology tailoring process serves as a service in the cloud. To illustrate Ontology as a Service, we propose sub‐ontology extraction and extension, whereby a sub‐ontology is extracted from the main ontology and is then extended to cover new concepts and relationships. We use a maximum extraction method to facilitate this. Unified Medical Language System meta‐thesaurus ontology is used as a walk‐through case study to illustrate our proposed methods.