Abstract

Abstract. The paper addresses the problem of reasoning with multiple ontologies interrelated with semantic mappings. This problem is becoming more and more relevant due to the necessity of building a scalable ontological reasoning tools for the Semantic Web. In contrast to the so called global approach, in which reasoning with multiple semantically related ontologies is performed in a global knowledge base that encodes both ontologies and semantic mappings, we propose a distributed reasoning approach in which reasoning is the result of combination via semantic mappings of local reasonings chunks performed in single ontologies. The paper presents a tableau-based distributed reasoning procedure which is sound and complete w.r.t. Distributed Description Logics, the formal framework used to represent multiple semantically connected ontologies. The paper also describes the design and implementation principles of a distributed reasoning system, called DRAGO (Distributed Reasoning Architecture for a Galaxy of Ontology), that implements such distributed decision procedure. 1

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