Contextualizing ontologies

  • Authors:

  • Paolo Bouquet;Fausto Giunchiglia;Frank van Harmelen;Luciano Serafini;Heiner Stuckenschmidt

  • Affiliations:

  • DIT, University of Trento, via Sommarive 14, 1-38050 Povo, Trento, Italy and ITC-IRST, Trento, Italy;DIT, University of Trento, via Sommarive 14, 1-38050 Povo, Trento, Italy and ITC-IRST, Trento, Italy;AI Department, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands;DIT, University of Trento, via Sommarive 14, 1-38050 Povo, Trento, Italy;AI Department, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Ontologies are shared models of a domain that encode a view which is common to a set of different parties. Contexts are local models that encode a party's subjective view of a domain. In this paper, we show how ontologies can be contextualized, thus acquiring certain useful properties that a pure shared approach cannot provide. We say that an ontology is contextualized or, also, that it is a contextual ontology, when its contents are kept local, and therefore not shared with other ontologies, and mapped with the contents of other ontologies via explicit (context) mappings. The result is Context OWL (C-OWL), a language whose syntax and semantics have been obtained by extending the OWL syntax and semantics to allow for the representation of contextual ontologies.