C-OWL: Contextualizing Ontologies
Abstract
Ontologies are shared models of a domain that encode a view which is common to a set of different parties. Contexts are local models that encode a party’s subjective view of a domain. In this paper we show how ontologies can be contextualized, thus acquiring certain useful properties that a pure shared approach cannot provide. We say that an ontology is contextualized or, also, that it is a contextual ontology, when its contents are kept local, and therefore not shared with other ontologies, and mapped with the contents of other ontologies via explicit (context) mappings. The result is Context OWL (C-OWL), a language whose syntax and semantics have been obtained by extending the OWL syntax and semantics to allow for the representation of contextual ontologies.
Highlights
- use case: peer-to-peer applications with a large degree of autonomy of the peer nodes but still with a strong need of coordination
- multiple ontologies (or sets or shared ontologies) which contain information which should not be integrated (an obvious example being informa- tion which is mutually inconsistent) should be contextualize
- in OWL, mappings are not part of the language. The ability of combining models is restricted to the import of complete models and to the use of the imported elements by direct reference.
- We concentrate on the OWL-DL fragment of OWL. This language is equivalent to the SHOIQ(D+) DL, i.e., SHIQ(D+) extended with an equivalent of the oneOf constructor.
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