Tuning Ontology Interoperability

The main contribution of this paper is the notion of ontology space, which allows us to move from an ontology-centric vision to a constellation-centric vision of the Web, where multiple ontologies and their interactions can be explicitly modeled and studied. This, in turn, allows us to study how OWL ontologies can interoperate, and, in particular, to provide two main results. The first is a formalization of the intended semantics of the OWL importing operator as opaque semantics. This result makes explicit the fact that the semantics of the importing ontology and of the imported ontology are independent. The second is the introduction of the notion of transparent semantics, which allows us to constrain the semantics of an ontology to be the same, on selected language elements, to that of a second reference ontology.