A categorial context with default reasoning approach to heterogeneous ontology integration

Abstract

With context unceasingly changing, available information among ontologies of different information sources is often heterogeneous. It is crucial to develop scalable and efficient ontological formalism. This paper presents a categorial context-based formalism with default reasoning, in which context information is extensively considered, and from the category theory point of view, we syncretize default reasoning and make a categorial context extension to description logics (DL) for heterogeneous ontology integration. The core part of the formalism is a categorial context based on the DL, which captures and explicitly represents the information about contexts, and constructs nonmonotonic default reasoning. Based on the formal framework, a prototype is developed based on JESS, RACER and Protégé OWL plugin, which can integrate different ontologies from multiple distributed sources with context information using default reasoning. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.