Abstract The notion of a conservative extension plays a central role in ontology design and integration: it can be used to formalize ontology refinements, safe mergings of two ontologies, and independent modules inside an ontology. Regarding reasoning support, the most basic task is to decide whether one ontology is a conservative extension of another. It has recently been proved that this problem is decidable and 2ExpTime-complete if ontologies are formulated in the basic description logic (DL) ALC. We consider more expressive DLs and begin to map out the boundary between decidable and undecidable by proving that conservative extensions are 2ExpTime-complete in ALCQI, but undecidable in ALCQIO. We also show that if conservative extensions are defined model-theoretically rather than in terms of the consequence relation, they are undecidable already in ALC.

Modularity is a key requirement for collaborative ontology engineering and for distributed ontology reuse on the Web. Modern ontology languages, such as OWL, are logic-based, and thus a useful notion of modularity needs to take the semantics of ontologies and their implications into account. We propose a logic-based notion of modularity that allows the modeler to specify the external signature of their ontology, whose symbols are assumed to be defined in some other ontology. We define two restrictions on the usage of the external signature, a syntactic and a slightly less restrictive, semantic one, each of which is decidable and guarantees a certain kind of “black-box ” behavior, which enables the controlled merging of ontologies. Analysis of real-world ontologies suggests that these restrictions are not too onerous. 1

The language of HEX-programs under the answer-set semantics is designed for interoperating with heterogeneous sources via external atoms and for meta-reasoning via higher-order literals in the context of the Semantic Web. As an important technique in managing knowledge bases, the notion of forgetting has received increasing interest in the knowledge-representation area. In this paper, we introduce a semantics-based theory of forgetting for HEX-programs and, in turn, for a class of OWL/RDF ontologies which allows to fully employ semantic information in managing ontologies like editing, merging, aligning, and redundancy removal. 1

Modularity is a key requirement for collaborative ontology engineering and for distributed ontology reuse on the Web. Modern ontology languages, such as OWL, are logic-based, and thus a useful notion of modularity needs to take the semantics of ontologies and their implications into account. We propose a logic-based notion of modularity that allows the modeler to specify the external signature of their ontology, whose symbols are assumed to be defined in some other ontology. We define two restrictions on the usage of the external signature, a syntactic and a slightly less restrictive, semantic one, each of which is decidable and guarantees a certain kind of “black-box ” behavior, which enables the controlled merging of ontologies. Analysis of real-world ontologies suggests that these restrictions are not too onerous. 1

Abstract. The design of comprehensive ontologies is a serious challenge. Therefore, it is necessary to support the ontology designer by providing him with design methodologies, ontology editors, and automated reasoning tools that explicate the consequences of his design decisions. Currently, reasoning tools are largely limited to the reasoning services (i) computing the subsumption hierarchy of the classes in an ontology and (ii) determining the consistency of these classes. In this paper, we survey the most important tasks that arise in ontology design and discuss how they can be supported by automated reasoning tools. In particular, we show that it is beneficial to go beyond the usual reasoning services (i) and (ii). 1

The success of the world wide web can be partially attributed to the network effect: The absence of central control on the content and the organization of the web allows thousands of independent actors to contribute resources (web pages) that are interlinked to form the web. Ongoing efforts to extend the current