Conjunctive Query Answering in Distributed Ontology Systems for Ontologies with Large OWL ABoxes

We present a query processing procedure for conjunctive queries in distributed ontology systems where a large ontology is divided into ontology fragments that are later distributed over a set of autonomous nodes. We focus on ontologies with large ABoxes. The query processing procedure determines and retrieves the facts that are relevant to answering a given query from other nodes, then construct a new fragment that includes the set of relevant facts, the local TBox and RBox. The given query is evaluated against the new fragment and answers are returned to the user. We prove that our technique returns sound answers for queries over OWL ontologies.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SEMWEB
• Authors: Xueying Chen, Michel Dumontier
• Keywords: Internet Technology, Large Ontology, Ontology, Query Processing Procedure, SEMWEB 2009