Contextual Terminologies

The paper addresses the issue of contextual representations of ontologies, as it arises in the area of normative system specifications for modeling multiagent systems. To this aim, the paper proposes a formalization of a notion of contextual terminology, that is to say, a terminology holding only with respect to a specific context. The formalization is obtained by means of a formal semantics framework which enables the expressivity of common description logics to reason within contexts (intra-contextual reasoning), allowing at the same time the possibility to reason also about contexts and their interplay (inter-contextual reasoning). Using this framework, two complex scenarios are discussed in detail and formalized.