A distributed description of facts in a distributed Semantic Web ontology

Abstract

During the development of semantic Web there emerged a need for creating semantic descriptions of large domains of interest. However, it turned out that the large size of ontologies containing such descriptions led to many negative effects. As a result, the topics of distributing ontologies and ontology modularization gained major importance. The purpose of this paper is to present a novel approach to describe semantics of modules in distributed ontologies. We categorize problems that are encountered while working with ontology modules and describe some of the best known methods of importing data from a source ontology to a target one. Then we describe our contextual framework that generalizes our approach to the contextualization. This framework introduces a hierarchy of contexts accompanied by a hierarchy of context instances. We show how such a structure helps to solve some crucial problems with modularization, like constraining visibility and avoiding inconsistencies or incoherencies.