Antoine Zimmermann, Jérôme Euzenat, Three semantics for distributed systems and their relations with alignment composition, in: Proc. 5th conference on International semantic web conference (ISWC), Athens (GA US), (Isabel Cruz, Stefan Decker, Dean Allemang, Chris Preist, Daniel Schwabe, Peter Mika, Michael Uschold, Lora Aroyo (eds), The semantic web - ISWC 2006 (Proc. 5th conference on International semantic web conference (ISWC)), Lecture notes in computer science 4273, 2006), pp16-29, 2006
An ontology alignment explicitly describes the relations holding between two ontologies. A system composed of ontologies and alignments interconnecting them is herein called a distributed system. We give three different semantics of a distributed system, that do not interfere with the semantics of ontologies. Their advantages are compared, with respect to allowing consistent merge of ontologies, managing heterogeneity and complying with an alignment composition operation. We show that only the two first variants, which differ from other proposed semantics, can offer a sound composition operation.