Reasoning on dynamically built reasoning space with ontology modules

Abstract

Several applications require reasoning over autonomously developed ontologies. Initially conceived to make explicit the semantics of a certain domain, these ontologies become a powerful tool for supporting business interactions, once heterogeneities have been solved and inconsistencies eliminated. Unfortunately, a stable coherent logical state is hard to maintain in such an environment, due to normal evolution carried out independently over individual ontologies. As a result, reasoning over autonomously developed ontologies has to face with both heterogeneity and inconsistency, in order to assure correct answering. In this paper we study the problem arising in these settings. We propose an incremental reasoning approach based on a virtual reasoning space that is filled with relevant ontology entities as query answering progresses. We show how to compute the set of relevant entities with respect to a user query and present an algorithm for reasoning with dynamically built reasoning spaces. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.