Heterogeneously Structured Ontologies - Integration, Connection, and Refinement

Abstract

This paper systematically applies tools and techniques from the area of algebraic specification theory to corresponding ontology structuring and design tasks. We employ the heterogeneous structuring mechanisms of the heterogeneous algebraic specification language HetCASL for defining an abstract notion of structured heterogeneous ontology. This approach enables the designer to split up a heterogeneous ontology into semantically meaningful parts and employ dedicated reasoning tools to them. In particular, we distinguish three fundamentally different kinds of combining heterogeneous ontologies: integration, connection, and refinement.