Distributed reasoning for semantically related domains

In applications ranging from information and service integration to the semantic web, it is expected that ontologies are fragmented and distributed, rather than monolithic and glued by semantic mappings. The latter are expressions that represent semantic invariants between conceptualizations of different ontologies. Distributed Description Logic (DDL) is a logical framework that represents a set of distributed ontologies with a set of Tboxes of a suitable descriptive language, and semantic mapping with a set of bridge rules from a source to a target ontology. Bridge rules link concepts, properties, and nominals of different Tboxes, and regulate the transfer of knowledge across the ontologies. Until now, however, DDL reasoning services were de?ned only in the case of mappings between concepts, while, in many cases, mappings between nominals and properties are also important. In this paper, we extend the DDL reasoning paradigm to treat mappings between nominals of different ontologies expressed in the SHOIQ Descriptive Language, the basic DL language for the web ontology language OWLDL. We provide a sound and complete distributed tableaux method for checking subsumption propagation via bridge rules