Modeling Contextualized Knowledge

Most of the knowledge available in the Semantic Web is context dependent. Examples of contextual information that is associated with knowledge are time, topic, provenance, reliability, etc. Recently, several paradigms, tools and languages have been proposed with the aim of adding context awareness into the Semantic Web. That is, enabling representation and reasoning not only with the knowledge alone, but also with the associated contextual information. Examples include RDF quadruples, named graphs, annotated RDF, and contextualized knowledge repositories. These new paradigms introduce a new dimension into knowledge engineering: in addition to individuals, concepts, properties and their relations, we also need to define the set of contexts, and we need to “split” the knowledge between these contexts. In this paper, we propose a modeling exercise with one of the tools, for which we choose the contextualized knowledge repository. The example is complex enough to highlight many issues connected with contextualized knowledge representation, and it could possibly become the first benchmark for contextual knowledge representation tools.