Divide and Conquer Semantic Web with Modular Ontologies - A Brief Review of Modular Ontology Language Formalisms

Distributed data and knowledge base applications need ontology languages and tools that can support collaborative construction, sharing, and use of large ontologies. Modular ontology languages aim to address this challenge by providing language support for organizing complex ontologies into relatively independent modules, selective sharing of information among ontology modules, and reasoning with multiple ontology modules. This paper summarizes the evolution, language features and semantics of recent modular ontology language proposals, including Distributed Description Logics (DDL),E-Connections and Package-based Description Logics (P-DL) and describes some steps towards a modular ontology language that meets the needs of real-world Semantic Web applications.