Abductive Reasoning for Semantic Matchmaking with Modular Ontologies

Semantic matchmaking is defined as a process of finding possible matches between requests and supplies based on their logical relations. Recently, attempts have been done to formalize this process in Description Logics (DLs). We extend this formalization to Packages-based Description Logics (P-DLs), the extensions of DLs for distributed and modular ontologies, for allowing the description of demands and offers to be represented in different terminologies. To support this task, we develop a distributed tableaux-based method for computing concept abduction, a non-monotonic inference service specifically proposed for this kind of operation.