Semantic Import: An Approach for Partial Ontology Reuse

As more and more applications use ontology to represent semantic information, how to support ontology reuse is becoming more and more important. In the OWL Web Ontology Language, the main primitive for ontology reuse is owl:imports. However, this “copy-andpaste” approach suffers a number of problems. In this paper, we propose a new import primitive, called semantic import, to facilitate partial ontology reuse. The main contributions of this paper include the semantics of semantic import and reasoning support for TBox reasoning in simple ontology spaces, where an ontology semantically imports vocabulary from another ontology. The semantic import approach provides a brand new way for partial ontology reuse.