A Semantic Importing Approach to Reusing Knowledge from Multiple Autonomous Ontology Modules

Semantic web aims to provide seamless access to a large number of inter-connected, autonomous resources. Hence, it is inevitable that ontologies on the semantic web are distributed and context-specific. There is an urgent need for ontology languages and reasoning services that allow knowledge from multiple ontologies to be combined and reused from specific points of view. We present the syntax and semantics of a modular ontology language SHOIQP to accomplish this goal. Specifically, a SHOIQP ontology consists of multiple ontology modules (each of which can be viewed as a SHOIQ ontology) and concept, role and nominal names can be shared by “importing” relations among modules. The proposed language supports contextualized interpretation, i.e., interpretation from the point of view of a specific package. We establish the necessary and sufficient constraints on domain relations (i.e., the relations between individuals in different local domains) to preserve the satisfiability of concept formulae, monotonicity of inference, and transitive reuse of knowledge. We also explore the relationship between SHOIQP and existing modular ontology languages such as distributed description logics (DDL) and E-connections.

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