Working with Multiple Ontologies on the Semantic Web

The standardization of the second generation Web Ontology Language, OWL, leaves a crucial issue for Web-based ontologies unsatisfactorily resolved: how to represent and reason with multiple distinct, but linked, ontologies. OWL provides the owl:imports construct which, roughly, allows Web ontologies to include other Web ontologies, but only by merging all the linked ontologies into a single logical “space.” Recent work on multidimensional logics, fusions and other combinations of modal logics, distributed and contextual logics, and the like have tried to find formalisms wherein knowledge bases (and their logic) are kept more distinct but yet affect each other. These formalisms have various degrees of robustness in their computational complexity, their modularity, their expressivity, and their intuitiveness to modelers. In this paper, we explore a family of such formalisms, grounded in E-connections as extensions to OWL, with emphasis on a novel sub-formalism that seems very strai...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: SEMWEB
• Authors: Bernardo Cuenca Grau, Bijan Parsia, Evren Sirin
• Keywords: Ontologies, SEMWEB 2004, Web Ontologies, Web-based Ontologies