An Architecture and Formalism for Handling Modular Ontologies

Abstract

The goal of my ongoing work is to provide an archi-tecture for developing and manipulating modular on-tologies in such a way that each ontology module can plug into or unplug from an ontology. This architecture builds on top of a fundamental formalism for modular ontologies. Through this formalism we are able to de-fine mechanisms for integrating different modules and develop algorithms for reasoning over the integrated modules. The resolution of inconsistencies arisen by conflicting axioms in different modules as well as the investigation of the impact of changes in a module on the other ontology modules are two important issues that need to be taken into consideration during the de-velopment of the formalism. Here, we briefly review