---
title: "Aspects of Distributed and Modular Ontology Reasoning"
authors:
  - "Luciano Serafini"
  - "Alexander Borgida"
  - "Andrei Tamilin"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2005/87"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2005/0087.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Nineteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2005
pages: "570-574"
track: ""
keywords:
---

# Aspects of Distributed and Modular Ontology Reasoning

Luciano Serafini, Alexander Borgida, Andrei Tamilin

*Proceedings of the Nineteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 570-574.

## Abstract

We investigate a formalism for reasoning with multiple local ontologies, connected by directional semantic mappings. We propose: (1) a relatively small change of semantics which localizes inconsistency (thereby making unnecessary global satisfiability checks), and preserves directionality of “knowledge import”; (2) a characterization of inferences using a fixed-point operator, which can form the basis of a cache-based implementation for local reasoners; (3) a truly distributed tableaux algorithm for cases when the local reasoners use subsets of SHIQ. Throughout, we indicate the applicability of the results to several recent proposals for knowledge representation and reasoning that support modularity, scalability and distributed reasoning.