On the Complexity of Semantic Integration of OWL Ontologies

Abstract: We propose a new mechanism for integration of OWL ontologies using semantic import relations. In contrast to the standard OWL importing, we do not require all axioms of the imported ontologies to be taken into account for reasoning tasks, but only their logical implications over a chosen signature. This property comes natural in many ontology integration scenarios, especially when the number of ontologies is large. In this paper, we study the complexity of reasoning over ontologies with semantic import relations and establish a range of tight complexity bounds for various fragments of OWL.