Institutionalising Ontology-Based Semantic Integration

We address what is still a scarcity of general mathematical foundations for ontology-based semantic integration underlying current knowledge engineering methodologies in decentralised and distributed environments. After recalling the first-order ontology-based approach to semantic integration and a formalisation of ontological commitment, we propose a general theory that uses a syntax-and interpretation-independent formulation of language, ontology, and ontological commitment in terms of institutions. We claim that our formalisation generalises the intuitive notion of ontology-based semantic integration while retaining its basic insight, and we apply it for eliciting and hence comparing various increasingly complex notions of semantic integration and ontological commitment based on differing understandings of semantics

Ontologies for the Semantic Web in CASL

This paper describes a sublanguage of Casl, called Casl-DL, that corresponds to the Web Ontology Language (OWL) being used for the semantic web. OWL can thus benefit from Casl’s strong typing discipline and powerful structuring concepts. Vice versa, the automatic decision procedures available for OWL DL (or more precisely, the underlying description logic SHOIN(D)) become available for a sublanguage of Casl. This is achieved via translations between Casl-DL and SHOIN(D), formalized as so-called institution comorphisms