Proceedings Chapter Reference Contextual Ontologies: Motivations, Challenges and Solutions

Abstract. Contextual ontologies are ontologies that characterize a con-cept by a set of properties that vary according to context. Contextual ontologies are now crucial for users who intend to exchange information in a domain. Existing ontology languages are not capable of defining such type of ontologies. The objective of this paper is to formally define a contextual ontology language to support the development of contex-tual ontologies. In this paper, we use description logics as an ontology language and then we extend it by introducing a new contextual con-structor