Distributed Description Logics: Directed Domain Correspondences in Federated Information Sources

A central problem of co-operative information systems is the ability to integrate information from multiple sources. Although this problem has been studied for several decades, there is a need for a more refined approach in those cases where the original sources form a loose federation, each maintaining its 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 IS. We then extend the logical formalism of Description Logics, which has previously served successfully in IS integration and is currently being used in semantic-web ontolgies, to handle such mappings. The result is called Distributed Description Logics, and we consider some of its desirable properties, as well as some theorems concerning its computational aspects.