Modular Reuse of Ontologies: Theory and Practice

In this paper, we propose a set of tasks that are relevant for the modular reuse of ontologies. In order to formalize these tasks as reasoning problems, we introduce the notions of conservative extension, safety and module for a very general class of logic-based ontology languages. We investigate the general properties of and relationships between these notions and study the relationships between the relevant reasoning problems we have previously identified. To study the computability of these problems, we consider, in particular, Description Logics (DLs), which provide the formal underpinning of the W3C Web Ontology Language (OWL), and show that all the problems we consider are undecidable or algorithmically unsolvable for the description logic underlying OWL DL. In order to achieve a practical solution, we identify conditions sufficient for an ontology to reuse a set of symbols "safely"--that is, without changing their meaning. We provide the notion of a safety class, whic...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: JAIR
• Authors: Bernardo Cuenca Grau, Ian Horrocks, Yevgeny Kazakov, Ulrike Sattler
• Keywords: JAIR 2008, Ontology Language, Reasoning Problems, Safety