Distributed Description Logics: Assimilating Information from Peer Sources

Due to the availability on the Internet of a wide variety of sources of information on related topics, the problem of providing seamless, integrated access to such sources has become (again) a major research challenge. Although this problem has been studied for several decades, there is a need for a more refined approach in those cases where the original soruces maintain their own independent view of the world. In particular, we investigate those situations where there may not be a simple one-to-one mapping between the individuals in the domains of the various Information Sources. Since Description Logics have already served successfully in information integration and as ontology languages, we extend this formalism with the ability to handle complex mappings between domains, through the use of so-called `bridge rules`. We investigate, among others, the exploitatio of bridge rules to deduce new information, especially subsumption relationship between concepts in local information sources