Constraint Reuse in DL-Lite Core with Arbitrary Number Restrictions

Abstract. The process of reusing an ontology involves two issues: (1) selecting a set of terms from the ontology vocabulary; and (2) using the ontology constraints to derive those that apply to such terms. The first issue corresponds to the familiar practice of importing namespaces. This paper proposes to address the second issue by introducing a set of operations over ontologies, treated as theories and not just as vocabularies. It discusses how to compute the operations for a class of ontologies built upon DL-Lite core with arbitrary number restrictions. Finally, for this class of ontologies, the paper addresses the question of minimizing the set of constraints which results from an operation