Introducing Contextual Reasoning to the Semantic Web with OWL^c

Representing the context of triples and reasoning on contextualized triples is an open problem in the semantic web. In this paper, we present OWLc: a contextual two-dimensional web ontology language. Using the first dimension, we can define contexts-dependent classes, properties, and axioms and using the second dimension, we can express knowledge about contexts which we consider formal objects, as proposed by McCarthy [17]. Moreover, we describe a contextual extension of the OWL entailment rules, and we present a new set of rules for reasoning on contexts. We demonstrate the modeling strength and reasoning capabilities of OWLc with a practical scenario from the digital humanity domain. We chose the FDS project in virtue of its inherent contextual nature, as well as its notable complexity which allow us to highlight many issues connected with contextual knowledge representation and reasoning