A Practical Implementation of Contextual Reasoning
for the Semantic Web
Sahar Aljalbout, Gilles Falquet and Didier Buchs
Centre Universitaire d’Informatique, University of Geneva, 7 route de Drize, Geneva, Switzerland
Keywords:
Contextual Reasoning, Contexts, Contextual OWL.
Abstract:
Dealing with context-sensitive information is a crucial aspect in the management of semantic web data.
Despite the importance of this topic, there is so far no accepted consensus regarding the precise way of enco-
ding and even more reasoning on contextual knowledge. In this paper, we introduce an approach to reason over
contextual knowledge in RDF, while committing to the semantics of a contextual description logic. The lines
of this paper are many folds. First, we present an extension of OWL 2 DL for contexts, that we call OWL 2
DL
C
. It is a two-dimensional web ontology language with one dimension for contextualized object knowledge
and one dimension for contexts. Second, we define an OWL
C
profile for contextual reasoning, similar to OWL
2 RL. And finally, we demonstrate that the model can be practically implemented using existing semantic web
technologies, especially using SPIN rules.
1 INTRODUCTION
The contextuality of knowledge is the problem of
the general inability of determining the meaning of
a piece of information or verifying its validity, wit-
hout assuming the context in which this information
has been stated, and thereby, in which it should be
interpreted (Klarman and Guti
´
errez-Basulto, 2011).
The primary role of contexts in the semantic web is
to provide additional knowledge about individual tri-
ples, such as the source, the occurring time or place,
certainty etc.
Although many data providers and semantic web
practitioners have attempted local approaches for tre-
ating contexts representation; there is, so far, no con-
sensus regarding the precise ways of encoding and
much less reasoning, on contextual knowledge. Ne-
vertheless, the representation of contexts in the se-
mantic web has been considered separately as, first,
a data problem, giving rise to several proposals to en-
code contexts into RDF (Nguyen et al., 2014)(Welty
et al., 2006) (Noy et al., 2006), and second, as a theo-
retical problem where several attempts to include the
context dimension to description logics have emerged
(Kutz et al., 2004) (Benslimane et al., 2006) (Klarman
and Guti
´
errez-Basulto, 2011) .
In this paper, we propose an approach to rea-
son over contextual knowledge in RDF using SPIN
1
,
1
http://spinrdf.org
while committing to the semantics of a contextual
description logic. The key idea behind this approach
is the definition of a formally solid contextual model,
but also practically applicable to data while using ex-
isting semantic web languages and tools. Throughout
this work, we adopted McCarthy's theory of contexts
(McCarthy, 1987), primarily because this theory of-
fers an instrumental view of contexts, where contexts
are considered as formal objects, describable in first-
order logic languages. In order to achieve our goal,
we do the following:
First, we propose a two-dimensional web onto-
logy language OWL 2 DL
C
, similar to OWL 2
DL
2
but based on a two dimensional descrip-
tion logic (2DL) (Klarman and Guti
´
errez-Basulto,
2011). The idea is to have two interacting lan-
guages: the core and the context language that we
present in section 3.
Second, in section 4, we propose a profile aimed
at applications that require scalable reasoning wit-
hout sacrificing too much expressive power that
we call OWL
C
.
Finally, the practical implementation of the for-
mal model arises two important questions: how
to encode the contexts in the RDF data model?
And how to practically implement the new con-
2
http://www.obitko.com/tutorials/ontologies-semantic-
web/owl-dl-semantics.html
Aljalbout, S., Falquet, G. and Buchs, D.
A Practical Implementation of Contextual Reasoning on the Semantic Web.
DOI: 10.5220/0006936802550262
In Proceedings of the 10th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (IC3K 2018) - Volume 2: KEOD, pages 255-262
ISBN: 978-989-758-330-8
Copyright © 2018 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
255
textual rules correlated with the generation of new
objects? As a first attempt, we extended the flu-
ent model (Aljalbout and Falquet, 2017) to re-
present many dimensions of contexts. We also
demonstrate, that using SPIN, the contextual en-
tailments rules can be feasibly implemented wit-
hout the need for creating new contextual reaso-
ners (section 5).
2 REQUIREMENTS FOR
CONTEXTS REPRESENTATION
AND REASONING
In the search for a suitable knowledge representation
and reasoning model, a relevant question arises about
the requirements that would serve best achieving a
community consensus on this topic. According to
our opinion, the following requirements should be
considered. The following list should therefore not
be considered as final, but rather as a starting point
in this discussion. The requirements are divided
into two groups respectively: requirements for
contextual knowledge representation and reasoning
requirements.
Contextual Knowledge Representation Requi-
rements:
Distinction between the object knowledge and the
contexts knowledge: the union of the vocabula-
ries used for each level must be disjoint. One
should unequivocally recognize if a statement be-
longs to the contextualized object knowledge, or
to the contexts’ knowledge.
Expressiveness of the model: the model must be
able to deal with polymorphism when adding new
dimensions of contexts. Additionally, relations
between contexts must be clearly and explicitly
specified within the model.
Representation compactness: Technically spea-
king, a model that introduces many properties and
objects can lead to undesirable graph size increa-
ses, which oftentimes cause detrimental memory
performance. The worst-case scenario could lead
to an explosion of the number of triples.
Contextual Reasoning Requirements:
Reasoning should take into the account the con-
textual meta-knowledge and relations between
contexts.
The contextual layer should not increase the com-
plexity of reasoning. Given the fact that some
of the semantic web languages already exhibit
quite high complexity (e.g., OWL 2, based on the
SROIQ DL, is 2NExpTime-complete (Kazakov,
2008)), we believe that the contextual layer must
be added without any increase in complexity.
3 OWL 2 DL
C
: A CONTEXTUAL
TWO- DIMENSIONAL WEB
ONTOLOGY LANGUAGE
OWL 2 DL was designed to support the existing
description logic business segment and has desira-
ble computational properties for reasoning systems.
OWL 2 DL is so named due to its correspondence
with description logics. In this section, we introduce
an extension of OWL 2 DL for contexts, that we call
OWL 2 DL
C
. It contains new contextual construc-
tors and is based on a two-dimensional description lo-
gic (Klarman and Guti
´
errez-Basulto, 2011) with two
interacting languages: the core language intended to
define a context-dependent description of the domain
concepts, roles, axioms and the context language used
to express knowledge about contexts.
A contextualized vocabulary is therefore a pair of
DL signatures (
h
N
C
, N
R
, N
I
i
,
h
N
KC
, N
KR
, N
KI
i
) where
N
C
(resp. N
KC
) is a set of domain (resp. context) con-
cept names, N
R
(N
KR
) is a set of domain (context) role
names, and N
I
(N
KI
) is a set of domain (context) indi-
viduals names.
3.1 General Syntax
A concept (resp. role) expression is either
a DL concept expression (resp. role) on the core
signature
h
N
C
, N
R
, N
I
i
or an expression of the form [K]C or
h
K
i
C (resp.
[K]R or
h
K
i
R) where K is a concept expression on
the context signature
h
N
KC
, N
KR
, N
KI
i
, and C is a
concept expression (resp. role expression) on the
core signature
h
N
C
, N
R
, N
I
i
.
An axiom expression is either
a DL axiom expression on the core signature
h
N
C
, N
R
, N
I
i
an expression of the form K : φ where K is a con-
text name (an element of N
KI
) or a concept ex-
pression on the context signature
h
N
KC
, N
KR
, N
KI
i
,
and φ is a concept axiom (C v D, C D,
C dis joint D) or a role axiom (R v S, ,
f unctional(R), transitive(R),. . .) or a class or role
assertion (C(a) , R(a, b)) defined on the core sig-
nature with contextual concept and role expres-
sions. Such an expression states that the axiom
KEOD 2018 - 10th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development
256
φ holds in the contexts that belong to the context
class K. For instance
before1970 : CanVote v Aged21orMore
states that the axiom CanVote v Aged21orMore
holds in the temporal context before1970.
3.2 Semantics
A contextual interpretation is a pair of interpretations
M = (I, J ) where I = (, ·
I[.]
) is the core interpre-
tation, J = (, ·
J
) is the context interpretation, and
=
/
0. ·
I[.]
is a family of interpretation functions,
one for each context k . .
J
is the (non-contextual)
interpretation function of every context in the context
language.
The interpretation of the class constructors of the
core language are the following:
>
I[k]
=
I[k]
=
/
0,
(C t D)
I[k]
= C
I[k]
D
I[k]
(C uD)
I[k]
= C
I[k]
D
I[k]
(¬C)
I[k]
=
I[k]
\C
I[k]
(R.C)
I[k]
= {x |∀y : (x, y) R
I[k]
y C
I[k]
}
(R.C)
I[k]
= {x |∃y : (x, y) R
I[k]
y
C
I[k]
}
{i
1
, i
2
, . . . , i
k
}
I[k]
= {i
I[k]
1
, i
I[k]
2
, . . . , i
I[k]
k
}
where C N
C
, D N
C
, R N
R
and i
k
N
I
.
In the following we will consider only contextual
interpretations that satisfy the rigid designator hypot-
hesis (LaPorte, 2006), i.e. i
I[k]
= i
I[k
0
]
for any i N
I
,
k , and k
0
.
The interpretation of the context-based concept
and role forming operators is as follows:
(
h
C
i
D)
I[k]
={x |∃y C
J
: x D
I[y]
}
([C]D)
I[k]
={x |∀y C
J
x D
I[y]
}
(
h
C
i
R)
I[k]
={(x, z) × |∃y C
J
: (x, z)
R
I[y]
}
([C]R)
I[k]
={(x, z) × |∀y C
J
(x, z)
R
I[y]
}
One can observe that the interpretations of these
constructors are independent of the context k. In
fact, these constructors yield concepts that are non-
contextual (or context independent).
On the other hand, the great appeal of the con-
text theory (McCarthy, 1987) stems from the postu-
late that declares a context as a formal object, as a
consequence it can have its own properties and rela-
tions with other contexts. The axioms of the contexts
language are formulas:
A v B | C(a)
where A N
KC
, B N
KC
, C N
KC
, a N
KI
. As we
can see, the interpretation of the context language is
standard (non-contextual).
A contextual axiom K : φ is satisfied by an inter-
pretation M if in every context k that belongs to the
interpretation of K, the interpretation in k of the con-
cepts, roles and individuals that appear in φ satisfy the
axiom condition
M |= K :C v D iff k K
J
: C
I[k]
D
I[k]
, where
C N
C
and D N
C
M |= K : R v S iff k K
J
: R
I[k]
S
I[k]
, where
R N
R
and S N
R
M |= K : prop(R) iff k K
J
: R
I[k]
has the
property prop, where prop can be f unctional,
transitive, re f lexive, etc.
M |= K : C(a) iff k K
J
: C(a)
I[k]
M |= K : R(a, b) iff k K
J
: R(a, b)
I[k]
(if K is not a concept expression but a context name
k, K
J
designates the singleton {k
J
} in the above ex-
pressions).
3.3 OWL 2 DL
C
Abstract Syntax
The contextual extension of the web ontology lan-
guage OWL 2 DL
C
is done systematically by adding
four new abstract syntax constructors whose seman-
tics is given in table 1. The OWL frame-like abstract
syntax is given in the first column, and the contextual
description logic (CDL) syntax is given in the second
column.
Table 1: New constructs of the OWL language.
OWL 2 DL
C
Abstract syntax CDL syntax
SomeConceptValuesFromContext(D[C])
h
C
i
D
AllConceptValuesFromContext(D[C])) [C]D
SomePropertyValuesFromContext(p[C])
h
C
i
p
AllpropertyValuesFromContext(p[C]) [C]p
A Practical Implementation of Contextual Reasoning on the Semantic Web
257
4 OWL
C
: A PROFILE FOR
SCALABLE CONTEXTUAL
REASONING
The evolving OWL 2 standard comes with a profile
called OWL 2 RL. According to the OWL 2 RL W3C
page
3
, the OWL 2 RL profile is aimed at applications
that require scalable reasoning without sacrificing too
much expressive power. In this section, we define a
profile for the contextual web ontology language that
we defined in section 3, by adapting the idea of OWL
2 RL to OWL 2 DL
C
. This is achieved by restricting
the use of constructs to certain syntactic positions,
exactly as in OWL 2 RL
4
. We limit our description
to the ALCO fragment which is proven to be deci-
dable, with a complexity of reasoning NEXPTIME-
complete (Klarman and Guti
´
errez-Basulto, 2011).
Reasoning with OWL
C
is divided into two parts:
reasoning for the object knowledge and reasoning for
the contexts knowledge. However, reasoning for the
contexts language is similar to classical reasoning in
OWL 2 RL, so we will introduce the rules of the
core language. In the original version of OWL 2 RL,
the rules are given as universally quantified first-order
implications over a ternary predicate T. This predi-
cate represents a generalization of RDF triples thus,
T(s,p,o) represents a generalized RDF triple with the
subject s, predicate p, and the object o. Variables in
the implications are preceded with a question mark.
To be able to represent contexts, we introduce a qua-
ternary predicate Q(s, p, o, co) where s is the subject,
p is the predicate, o is the object and co is the con-
text for which the predicate holds. If the ontology has
multiple contextual dimensions (e.g. time and pro-
venance) co must be understood as co
1
, . . . , co
m
and
hence Q as a m + 3-ary predicate.
We divided the rules into two categories. In table
2, we redefine the semantics of the classical OWL 2
RL rules of the ALCO fragment by including the con-
textual semantics described in section 3 and in table
3, we introduce new contextual rules for the new con-
cept forming operators that we presented in the pre-
vious section. Syntactic restrictions are applied to the
new constructors: an existential contextual restriction
(
h
C
i
D,
h
C
i
R) may only appear in the left-hand side
of a subclass axiom, whereas a universal contextual
restriction ([C]D, [C]R) may only appear in the right-
hand side.
3
https://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-profiles/
4
https://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-profiles/
#Feature Overview 3
Figure 1: The design pattern for contextual property asser-
tions.
Figure 2: The design pattern for contextual class assertions.
5 IMPLEMENTATION
In this section, we apply the logical model proposed
in section 3 and 4 on the RDF data model. This invol-
ves the following: i) the choice of a context represen-
tation method that fits the requirements of section 2 ii)
mapping the 2DL to the chosen method iii) choosing
a way to implement the entailment rules.
5.1 Contexts Representation
We previously presented in (Aljalbout and Falquet,
2017) a pattern for the representation of temporal pro-
perties (i.e. fluent) in RDF. This pattern was imple-
mented in a historical knowledge base (Aljalbout and
Falquet, 2018). In this section, we extend this pat-
tern to represent contextual classes and properties as-
sertions with many dimensions of contexts. Figure
1 shows the design pattern of a contextual property
assertion and figure 3 shows the design pattern of a
contextual class assertion.
We used the standard mapping of OWL to RDF
5
to map the DL formalization presented in section 3
with the RDF pattern presented in section 5.1. Table
4 and 5 illustrates respectively the mapping of the
two languages to RDF :
CE[co] denotes a contextual class expression;
OPE[co] denotes a contextual object property ex-
pression;
T : O T (O) where T maps a structural element
specification E from the ontology O to a set of
triples T (E) in the RDF graph.
Due to space limitations in the table, we use the prefix
owl
c
instead of owl-contextual.
5
https://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-mapping-to-rdf/
KEOD 2018 - 10th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development
258
Table 2: Part of the entailment rules for the core language.
IF THEN
cls-com
¬C
T(?c
1
, owl:complementOf, ?c
2
)
Q(?x, rdf:type, ?c
1
, ?co)
Q(?x, rdf:type, ?c
2
, ?co)
false
cls-int1
C u D
T(?c, owl:intersectionOf, ?x)
LIST[?x, ?c1, ..., ?cn]
Q(?y, rdf:type, ?c1, ?co)
Q(?y, rdf:type, ?c2, ?co)
...
Q(?y, rdf:type, ?cn, ?co)
Q(?y, rdf:type, ?c, ?co)
cls-int2
C u D
T(?c, owl:intersectionOf, ?x)
LIST[?x, ?c
1
, ..., ?c
n
]
Q(?y, rdf:type, ?c, ?co)
Q(?y, rdf:type, ?c
1
, ?co)
Q(?y, rdf:type, ?c
2
, ?co)
...
Q(?y, rdf:type, ?c
n
, ?co)
cls-uni
C t D
T(?c, owl:unionOf, ?x)
LIST[?x, ?c
1
, ..., ?c
n
]
Q(?y, rdf:type, ?c
i
, ?co)
Q(?y, rdf:type, ?c, ?co)
cls-svf1-1
R.C
T(?x, owl:someValuesFrom, ?y)
T(?x, owl:onProperty, ?p)
Q(?u, ?p, ?v, ?co)
Q(?v, rdf:type, ?y, ?co)
Q(?u, rdf:type, ?x, ?co)
cls-svf1-2
R.C
T(?x, owl:someValuesFrom, ?y)
T(?x, owl:onProperty, ?p)
T(?u, ?p, ?v)
Q(?v, rdf:type, ?y, ?co)
Q(?u, rdf:type, ?x, ?co)
cls-svf1-3
R.C
T(?x, owl:someValuesFrom, ?y)
T(?x, owl:onProperty, ?p)
Q(?u, ?p, ?v, ?co)
T(?v, rdf:type, ?y)
Q(?u, rdf:type, ?x, ?co)
cls-avf-1
R.C
T(?x, owl:allValuesFrom, ?y)
T(?x, owl:onProperty, ?p)
Q(?u, rdf:type, ?x, ?co)
Q(?u, ?p, ?v, ?co)
Q(?v, rdf:type, ?y, ?co)
cls-avf-2
R.C
T(?x, owl:allValuesFrom, ?y)
T(?x, owl:onProperty, ?p)
Q(?u, rdf:type, ?x, ?co)
T(?u, ?p, ?v)
Q(?v, rdf:type, ?y, ?co)
cls-avf-3
R.C
T(?x, owl:allValuesFrom, ?y)
T(?x, owl:onProperty, ?p)
Q(?u, rdf:type, ?x, ?co)
Q(?u, ?p, ?v, ?co)
T(?v, rdf:type, ?y)
5.2 Reasoning with OWL
C
using Spin
SPIN
6
or in other terms SPARQL rules can run di-
rectly on RDF data. It can be used to encapsulate
reusable SPARQL queries as templates. One advan-
tage of the templates is that they are flexible enough
that you can simply pass parameters to them to custo-
mize their behavior. Then, they can be instantiated in
6
http://spinrdf.org
any RDF or OWL ontology to add inference rules!
Using TopBraid Composer
7
, we converted
the OWL
C
rules, presented in section 4, into
SPIN templates available at the following link
http://cui.unige.ch/isi/owl-rlc. The structure of the
templates is based on the previously defined patterns
in section 5.1. In order to perform contextual reaso-
7
https://www.topquadrant.com/tools/ide-topbraid-
composer-maestro-edition/
A Practical Implementation of Contextual Reasoning on the Semantic Web
259
Table 3: Entailment rules for the new contexts-based forming operators.
IF THEN
cxt-svf
(
h
C
i
D)
T(?e, owl
c
: onClass, ?d)
T(?e, owl
c
: inSomeContextOf, ?co)
Q(?x, rdf:type, ?d, ?y)
T(?y, rdf:type, ?co)
T(?x, rdf:type, ?e)
cxt-avf
([C]D)
T(?e, owl
c
: onClass, ?d)
T(?e, owl
c
: inAllContextOf, ?co)
T(?x, rdf:type, e)
Q(?x, rdf:type, ?d, ?y)
T(?y, rdf:type, ?co)
cxt-svf
(
h
C
i
P)
T(?e, owl:onProperty, ?p)
T(?e, owl
c
:inSomeContextOf, ?co)
Q(?x1, ?p, ?x2, ?y)
T(?y, rdf:type, ?co)
T(?p, rdf:type, ?e)
cxt-avf
([C]P)
T(?e, owl:onproperty, ?p)
T(?e, owl
c
: inAllContextOf, ?co)
T(?p, rdf:type, ?e)
Q(?x1, ?p, ?x2, ?y)
T(?y, rdf:type, ?co)
Table 4: Samples of the mapping of the core language to RDF.
Element E of the Structural Specification
Triples Generated in an Invocation of
T(E)
ClassAssertion( CE[co] a )
T(a) owl
c
:representedBy :x.
:x rdf:type T(CE) .
:x rdf:type owl
c
:contextualRelation.
:x owl
c
:contextualExtent T(co).
ObjectPropertyAssertion( OP[co] a1 a2 )
T(a1) T(OP) :x.
:x rdf:type owl
c
:contextualRelation .
:x T(OP) T(a2).
:x owl
c
:contextualExtent T(co).
Table 5: Mapping the context language to RDF.
Element E of the Structural Specification
Triples Generated in an Invocation of
T(E)
SomeConceptValuesFromContext(CE[co ])
:x rdf:type owl
c
:ContextRestriction .
:x owl
c
:onClass T(CE) .
:x owl
c
:inSomeContextOf T(co) .
AllConceptValuesFromContext(CE[co ])
:x rdf:type owl
c
:ContextRestriction .
:x owl
c
:onClass T(CE) .
:x owl
c
:inAllContextOf T(co) .
SomePropertyValuesFromContext(OPE[co ])
:x rdf:type owl
c
:ContextRestriction .
:x owl:onProperty T(OPE) .
:x owl
c
:inSomeContextOf T(co) .
AllPropertyValuesFromContext(OPE[co ])
:x rdf:type owl
c
:ContextRestriction .
:x owl:onProperty T(OPE) .
:x owl
c
:inAllContextOf T(co) .
KEOD 2018 - 10th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development
260
Figure 3: Template of the cls-int rule.
ning with OWL
C
, the user has to:
(1) create his triples following the syntax described
in section 5.1.
(2) instantiate the rules under the contextualEntity
form
8
.
Figure 3 shows the example of the cls-int rule
encapsulated as a SPIN template. This template, si-
milarly to all others, is implemented using a SPARQL
INSERT request. It declares that the assertion of the
same individual in two classes, holding for the same
context, generates an assertion for this individual
in the intersection of those classes, but also for the
same holding contexts. Notice two things: first, the
classes are declared as spin:constraint and second,
the query contains a filter. The existence of the filter
is of a major importance because it guarantees that
an existing triple is not generated again and again,
whenever the rules are running.
6 RELATED WORKS
Related works can be divided in two groups: theore-
tical and practical. In the theoretical group, in 2001,
(Ghidini and Giunchiglia, 2001) introduced the idea
of locality and compatibility where reasoning is con-
sidered mainly local and compatibility is argued to be
8
You can find all the rules under spin:modules/
spin:templates
used among the reasoning performed in different con-
texts. In 2003, (Borgida and Serafini, 2003) introdu-
ced the concept of distributed description logics. An
advantage of DDLs is its support for multiple ontolo-
gies. However, the coordination between a pair of on-
tologies can only happen with the use of bridge rules.
In 2004, a new concept called E-connections (Kutz
et al., 2004) emerged: ontologies are interconnected
by defining new links between individuals belonging
to distinct ontologies. One major disadvantage is that
it does not allow concepts to be subsumed by concepts
of another ontology, which limits the expressiveness
of the language. Then, in 2006, (Benslimane et al.,
2006) attempted to extend description logics with new
constructs with relative success. In 2011, a proposi-
tion was argued to use a two dimensional- description
logics. Results showed that this approach does not
necessarily increase the computational complexity of
reasoning. In 2012, (Bozzato et al., 2012) argues that
treating contexts in the semantic web needs more ad-
vanced means, such that contexts should be explicitly
presented and logically treated...
In the practical group, many attempts to find a so-
lution to the syntactic restriction of RDF binary rela-
tions emerged. Two types of works were proposed:
(a) Extending the data model or the semantic of RDF
(Dividino et al., 2009) (Hartig and Thompson,
2014) (Nguyen et al., 2014)
(b) Using design patterns: It could be categorized al-
ong three axis (similarly to (Hayes, 2004)): 3D,
3D+1, 4D.
3D representation: the contextual index co is
attached to the sentence R(a,b) and thus R(a,b)
holds for co such as RDF reification (Berners-
Lee et al., 2001).
3D+1 representation: the contextual index co is
attached to the relation R(a,b,co) (Gangemi and
Mika, 2003) (Aljalbout and Falquet, 2017).
4D representation: the contextual index co is
attached to the object terms R(a@co, b@co)
where co is the contextual-slice of the thing na-
med (Welty, 2010) (Welty et al., 2006)
7 CONCLUSION
In this paper, we intended to push forward the task
of contextual reasoning in the semantic web. The-
refore, we highlighted in section 2 the requirements
that a contextual reasoning formalism must have, in
order to best serve its purpose. To comply with those
requirements, we proposed OWL 2 DL
C
, an exten-
sion of OWL 2 DL. The particularity of this web on-
A Practical Implementation of Contextual Reasoning on the Semantic Web
261
tology language is that it consists of two dimensi-
ons: a context-dependent object dimension and a con-
text dimension. Additionally, we defined a profile for
applications that require scalable reasoning that we
call OWL
C
. It contains new context-dependent rules
and novel rules for handling the new contextual con-
structs. The model does not increase the complexity
of reasoning making it conform to the requirements.
A practical implementation of the model was provi-
ded in section 5 using spin rules and an extension of
the fluent pattern we introduced in a previous work
(Aljalbout and Falquet, 2017). In the future works,
we tend to update OWL
C
by considering the semantic
relations that could exist between the contexts.
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