Distributed Reasoning Services for Multiple Ontologies

The main goal of this paper is to propose a distributed paradigm for reasoning with multiple ontologies connected by semantic mappings. The contribution of the paper to this goal is twofold. From the theoretical point of view we characterize the problem of global subsumption (i.e. the problem of subsumption in a set of local ontologies connected by semantic mappings) as a suitable fixpoint combination of operators that compute subsumptions in the local ontologies. This allows us to define a sound and complete algorithm for global subsumptions which calls black-boxes sub-routines for local subsumptions. The second contribution is the description of a prototype implementation of such algorithm in a peer-to-peer architecture.