A Survey of Ontology Modularization Formalisms

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate state-of-the-art technologies in the area of modular ontologies and corresponding logical formalisms. We compare the strengths and weaknesses of different formalisms for modular ontologies in their ability to support networked, dynamic and distributed ontologies, as well as the reasoning capability over these ontologies. The comparison result shows limitations of existing formalisms to fully address the need of modular ontologies in the given setting, and possible future extensions to overcome those limitations.