OWLC: A Contextual Two-Dimensional Web Ontology Language

Representing and reasoning on contexts is an open problem in the semantic web. Despite the fact that context representation has for a long time been treated locally by semantic web practitioners, a recognized and widely accepted consensus regarding the way of encoding and particularly reasoning on contextual knowledge has not yet been reached by far. In this paper, we present OWL^C : a contextual two-dimensional web ontology language. Using the first dimension, we can reason on contexts-dependent classes, properties, and axioms and using the second dimension, we can reason on knowledge about contexts which we consider formal objects, as proposed by McCarthy [McCarthy, 1987]. We demonstrate the modeling strength and reasoning capabilities of OWL^C with a practical scenario from the digital humanity domain. We chose the Ferdinand de Saussure [Joseph, 2012] use case in virtue of its inherent contextual nature, as well as its notable complexity which allows us to highlight many issues connected with contextual knowledge representation and reasoning.