Semantic cooperation and knowledge reuse by using autonomous ontologies

Several proposals have been put forward to support distributed agent cooperation in the Semantic Web, by allowing concepts and roles in one ontology be reused in another ontology. In general, these proposals reduce the autonomy of each ontology by defining the semantics of the ontology to depend on the semantics of the other ontologies. We propose a new framework for managing autonomy in a set of cooperating ontologies (or ontology space). In this framework, each language entity (concept/role/individual) in an ontology may have its meaning assigned either locally with respect to the semantics of its own ontology, to preserve the autonomy of the ontology, or globally with respect to the semantics of any neighbouring ontology in which it is defined, thus enabling semantic cooperation between multiple ontologies. In this way, each ontology has a "subjective semantics" based on local interpretation and a "foreign semantics" based on semantic binding to neighbouring ontologies. We study the...