Evaluating Formalisms for Modular Ontologies in Distributed Information Systems

Modern semantic technology is one of the necessary supports for the infrastructure of next generation information systems. In particular, large international organizations, which usually have branches around the globe, need to manage web-based, complex, dynamically changing and geographically distributed information. Formalisms for modular ontologies offer the necessary mechanism that is needed to handle ontology-based distributed information systems in the aforementioned scenario. In this paper, we investigate state-of-the-art technologies in the area of modular ontologies and corresponding logical formalisms. We compare different formalisms for modular ontologies in their ability to support networked, dynamic and distributed ontologies, as well as the reasoning capability over these ontologies. The comparison results show the strength and limitation of existing formalisms against the needs of modular ontologies in the given setting, and possible future extensions to overcome those li...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: RR
• Authors: Yimin Wang, Jie Bao, Peter Haase, Guilin Qi
• Keywords: Distributed Ontologies, Logical Formalisms, Modular Ontologies, RR 2007