Reasoning over ontologies with hidden content: the import-by-query approach

  • Authors:

  • Bernardo Cuenca Grau;Boris Motik

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, Oxford University, Oxford, UK;Department of Computer Science, Oxford University, Oxford, UK

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

There is currently a growing interest in techniques for hiding parts of the signature of an ontology κh that is being reused by another ontology κv. Towards this goal, in this paper we propose the import-by-query framework, which makes the content of κh accessible through a limited query interface. If κv reuses the symbols from κh in a certain restricted way, one can reason over κv ∪ κh by accessing only κv and the query interface. We map out the landscape of the import-by-query problem. In particular, we outline the limitations of our framework and prove that certain restrictions on the expressivity of κh and the way in which κv reuses symbols from κh are strictly necessary to enable reasoning in our setting. We also identify cases in which reasoning is possible and we present suitable import-by-query reasoning algorithms.