Description logics, rules and multi-context systems

Abstract

The combination of rules and ontologies has been a fertile topic of research in the last years, with the proposal of several different systems that achieve this goal. In this paper, we look at two of these formalisms, Mdl-programs and multi-context systems, which address different aspects of this combination, and include different, incomparable programming constructs. Despite this, we show that every Mdl-program can be transformed in a multi-context system, and this transformation relates the different semantics for each paradigm in a natural way. As an application, we show how a set of design patterns for multi-context systems can be obtained from previous work on Mdl-programs. © Springer-Verlag 2013.