Distributed Description Logics: Assimilating Information from Peer Sources

Due to the availability on the Internet of a wide variety of sources of information on closely 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, especially in the database community, there is a need for a more refined approach in those cases where the original sources maintain their own independent view of the world. In particular, we motivate with examples the utility of directed non-injective mappings between the individuals in the domains of multiple 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 the above kinds of mappings. The result is called Distributed Description Logics, and we investigate examples, desirable properties, and formal definitions, providing at the end a number of theorems concerning its theoretical and computational aspects