Ontology as a Service (OaaS): extracting and replacing sub-ontologies on the cloud

Cloud computing is founded by the concept of service computing, where everything is a service—computing services are now utilities. There are various known services in cloud computing. At the moment, there are Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Hardware/Infrastructure as a Service (HaaS/IaaS), and Database as a Service (DaaS). In this paper, we propose Ontology as a Service (OaaS), which is an ontology tailoring process service in the cloud. In particular, we focus on sub-ontology extraction and replacement on the cloud. We use the Maximum Extraction method to facilitate this. UMLS meta-thesaurus ontology is used as a walk-through case study to illustrate our proposed method.