Semantic Cooperation and Knowledge Reuse by Using Autonomous Ontologies

Abstract

Abstract. Several proposals have been put forward to support distributed agent cooperation in the Semantic Web, by allowing concepts and roles in one ontology be reused in another ontology. In general, these proposals reduce the autonomy of each ontology by defining the semantics of the ontology to depend on the semantics of the other ontologies.We propose a new framework for managing autonomy in a set of cooperating ontologies (or ontology space). In this framework, each language entity (concept/role/individual) in an ontology may have its meaning assigned either locally with respect to the semantics of its own ontology, to preserve the autonomy of the ontology, or globally with respect to the semantics of any neighbouring ontology in which it is defined, thus enabling semantic cooperation between multiple ontologies.In this way, each ontology has a "subjective semantics" based on local interpretation and a "foreign semantics" based on semantic binding to neighbouring ontologies. We study the properties of these two semantics and describe the conditions under which entailment and satisfiability are preserved. We also introduce two reasoning mechanisms under this framework: "cautious reasoning" and "brave reasoning". Cautious reasoning is done with respect to a local ontology and its neighbours (those ontologies in which its entities are defined); brave reasoning is done with respect to the transitive closure of this relationship. This framework is independent of ontology languages. As a case study, for Description Logic ALCN we present two tableau-based algorithms for performing each form of reasonings and prove their correctness.

Sub-ontology modularization for large-scale web ontologies

“…Bouquet et al in [19] proposed Context OWL (C-OWL) by extending the OWL syntax and semantics to allow for the representation of contextual ontologies. Zhao et al in [20] proposed a new framework for managing autonomy in a set of cooperating ontologies to overcome the shortcoming of C-OWL. Semantic caching.…”

Learning Complex Mappings between Ontologies

“…It is worth noting that the above Horn-rule mappings can only cover a kind of "sequential" complex mappings, rather than some "combinational" mappings [3] or formula-like ones [1]. The semantics of Horn-rule mappings may be interpreted using the binding semantics [11], where each ontology has a "subjective semantics" based on local interpretation and a "foreign semantics" based on semantic binding to matched ontologies. In general, reasoning with OWL and Horn-rules is an undecidable problem [6].…”

Introspective forgetting

“…Baral and Zhang joined this battleground for more explicit operators for knowledge and belief with their (Baral and Zhang, 2005), wherein the result of an agent forgetting a variable results in her (explicit) ignorance of that variable's value, and in (Zhang and Zhou, 2008), in progress, Zhang and Zhou make an original and interesting backtrack to the ideas of (Lin and Reiter, 1994) by suggesting bisimulation invariance except for the forgotten variable, in order to model forgetting. Forgetting has been generalized to logic programs in Zhang et al, 2005;Eiter and Wang, 2006) and to description logics in (Zhao et al, 2007). Forgetting of (abstracting from) actions in planning has been investigated in (Erdem and Ferraris, 2007).…”