Reasoning with Instances in Distributed Description Logics

This report contributes to the study of a logical framework of distributed description logics (DDL) designed to formally capture the environments composed from multiple ontologies interrelated by semantic mappings. In such a framework a distributed knowledge base consists of a family of standard DL knowledge bases corresponding to each given ontology, a set of bridge rules corresponding to mapping between pairs of terminologies (T-boxes) and individual correspondences corresponding to rules for mapping individuals across instance storages (A-boxes). The main objective of this study is to investigate the problem of reasoning with instances in DDL. In particular, we disclose the role of mappings in reasoning, give a logical characterization to this role, and on the base of the given characterization define and implement a distributed tableaux reasoner DRAGO