C-OWL: Contextualizing Ontologies 1 Paolo Bouquet ab Fausto Giunchiglia ab Frank van Harmelen c

The aim of the Semantic Web is to make information on the World Wide Web more accessible using machine-readable meta-data. In this context, the need for explicit models of semantic information (terminologies and background knowledge) in order to support information exchange has been widely acknowledged by the research community. Several different ways of describing information semantics have been proposed and used in applications. However we can distinguish two broad approaches which follow somehow opposite directions: Ontologies are shared models of some domain that encode a view which is common to a set of different parties; Contexts are local (where local is intended here to imply not shared) models that encode a party’s view of a domain. Contexts and ontologies have both strengths and weaknesses. It can be argued that the strengths of ontologies are the weaknesses of contexts and vice versa. On the one hand, the use of ontologies enables the parties to communicate and exchange information. Shared ontologies define a common understanding of specific terms, and thus mak