ONTOarg: A decision support framework for ontology integration based on argumentation

Description Logic Programming (DLP) is a well-known approach to reason with Description Logic (DL) ontologies, translating them into the language of logic programming (LP). Even though DLP offers several advantages in terms of efficiency and reuse of existing logic programming tools (such as Prolog environments), a major hindrance of this approach is its limitation for reasoning in the presence of inconsistent ontologies. Recent research has led to the use of defeasible argumentation to model different DL reasoning capabilities when handling inconsistent ontologies, resulting in so-called delta-ontologies. In this article we present ONTOarg, a decision support framework for performing local-as-view integration of possibly inconsistent and incomplete ontologies in terms of Defeasible Logic Programming (DeLP). We show how to reason on Description Logics (DL) ontologies in an ontology integration system by performing a dialectical analysis in order to determine the membership of individuals to concepts. We present formal definitions of a framework for ontology integration of DL ontologies based on DeLP along with a case study and review some of the properties of the approach. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.