Distributed Description Logics: Assimilating Information from Peer Sources.

Abstract

Due to the availability on the Internet of a wide variety of sources of information on closely related topics, the problem of providing seamless, integrated access to such sources has become (again) a major research challenge. Although this problem has been studied for several decades, especially in the database community, there is a need for a more refined approach in those cases where the original sources maintain their own independent view of the world. In particular, we motivate with examples the utility of directed non-injective mappings between the individuals in the domains of multiple Information Sources.