Two-Dimensional Description Logics of Context
Szymon Klarman, Víctor Gutiérrez-Basulto · ORCA Online Research @Cardiff (Cardiff University) · 2011
Description Logics (DLs) provide a clear and broadly accepted paradigm for rea- soning about terminological knowledge. Under the standard Kripkean semantics, a DL ontology forces a unique, global view on the represented world, in which the ontology axioms are interpreted as universally true. This philosophy is well- suited as long as everyone can share the same conceptual perspective on the domain or there is no need for considering alternative viewpoints. Alas, this is hardly ever the case since a domain can be modeled dierently depending on the intended use of an ontology. Consequently, eective representation and reasoning about knowledge pertaining to such multiple, heterogenous viewpoints becomes the primary objective for many practical applications [1,2]. The challenges above resemble clearly those problems that originally inspired J. McCarthy to introduce a theory of formalizing contexts in knowledge repre- sentation systems, as a way of granting them more generality [3,4]. The gist of his proposal is to replace logical formulas ', as the basic knowledge carriers, with assertions ist(c; ') stating that ' is true in c, where c denotes an abstract first- order entity called a context, which on its own can be described in a first-order language.