On the Complexity of Semantic Integration of OWL Ontologies
This addresses the challenge of efficient ontology integration for large-scale semantic web applications, though it is incremental as it builds on existing OWL frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of integrating OWL ontologies by proposing a new mechanism using semantic import relations, which reduces reasoning complexity by focusing only on logical implications over a chosen signature, and establishes tight complexity bounds for various OWL fragments.
We propose a new mechanism for integration of OWL ontologies using semantic import relations. In contrast to the standard OWL importing, we do not require all axioms of the imported ontologies to be taken into account for reasoning tasks, but only their logical implications over a chosen signature. This property comes natural in many ontology integration scenarios, especially when the number of ontologies is large. In this paper, we study the complexity of reasoning over ontologies with semantic import relations and establish a range of tight complexity bounds for various fragments of OWL.