Reasoning with Instances of Heterogeneous Ontologies

We address the problem of reasoning with instances of heterogeneously formalized ontologies. Given a set of semantic mappings, reconciling conceptual and instance level heterogeneity between the input ontologies, we build our approach upon the capability of mappings to enforce a propagation of concept membership assertions between ontologies. The approach is formally grounded on a distributed description logic framework, which formally encodes ontologies as description logic knowledge bases and mappings as bridge rules and individual correspondences. We first give a logical characterization to the propagation of concept membership assertions along bridge rules and individual correspondences between the input SHIQ-ontologies, and further define a sound and complete tableau algorithm for capturing such a propagation. 1 Motivation and Approach Ontology heterogeneity is one of the crucial problems to be solved on the semantic web. To sustain this claim it is enough to give a glance on th...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: SWAP
• Authors: Luciano Serafini, Andrei Tamilin
• Keywords: Concept Membership Assertions, Input Ontologies, Semantic Mappings, SWAP 2007, SWAP 2008