Formal Properties of Modularisation

Modularity of ontologies is currently an active research field, and many different notions of a module have been proposed. In this paper, we review the fundamental principles of modularity and identify formal properties that a robust notion of modularity should satisfy. We explore these properties in detail in the contexts of description logic and classical predicate logic and put them into the perspective of well-known concepts from logic and modular software specification such as interpolation, forgetting and uniform interpolation. We also discuss reasoning problems related to modularity.

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