Towards Distributed Tableaux Reasoning Procedure for DDL with Increased Subsumption Propagation between Remote Ontologies

Homola, M. and Serafini, L.

Distributed Description Logics (DDL) enable reasoning with multiple ontologies interconnected by directional semantic mapping. In DDL semantic mapping is indicated by so called bridge rules. There are two kinds: into- and onto-bridge rules. Mappings between concepts allow subsumption to propagate from one ontology to another. However, in some cases, especially when more than two local ontologies are involved, subsumption does not always propagate as we would expect. In a recent study, an adjusted semantics has been introduced that is able to cope with more complex scenarios. In particular, subsumption propagates along chains of several bridge rules under this new semantics. This study makes use of so called compositional consistency requirement that has been employed before in Package-based description logics. While the results concerning subsumption propagation under the adjusted semantics are encouraging, we show in this paper that this semantics also has drawbacks. In certain situations it violates the directionality principle. We propose a weaker version of the semantics in this paper that is able to cope with chains of onto-bridge rules but it is not able to deal with chains of into-bridge rules. Furthermore we provide a sound and complete tableaux reasoning algorithm for this semantics.

Cite as: Homola, M. and Serafini, L. (2008). Towards Distributed Tableaux Reasoning Procedure for DDL with Increased Subsumption Propagation between Remote Ontologies. In Proc. Knowledge Representation Ontology Workshop (KROW 2008), Sydney, Australia. CRPIT, 90. Meyer, T. and Orgun, M. A., Eds. ACS. 21-30.

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