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Towards a Functional Approach to Modular Ontologies Using Institutions

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Abstract

We propose a functional view of ontologies that emphasises their role in determining answers to queries, irrespective of the formalism in which they are written. A notion of framework is introduced that captures the situation of a global language into which both an ontology language and a query language can be translated, in an abstract way. We then generalise existing notions of robustness from the literature, and relate these to interpolation properties that support modularisation of ontologies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, L69 3BX, UK

    Daniel Pokrywczyński & Grant Malcolm

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  1. Daniel Pokrywczyński
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  2. Grant Malcolm
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Correspondence to Grant Malcolm.

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Pokrywczyński, D., Malcolm, G. Towards a Functional Approach to Modular Ontologies Using Institutions. Stud Logica 102, 117–143 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11225-012-9466-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11225-012-9466-z

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