Extending Expressiveness of Knowledge Description with Contextual Approach.

In the paper we show how imposing the contextual structure of a knowledge base can lead to extending its expressiveness without changing the underlying language. We show this using the example of Description Logics, which constitutes a base for a range of dialects for expressing knowledge in ontologies (including state-of-the-art OWL). While the contextual frameworks have been used in knowledge bases, they have been perceived as a tool for merging different viewpoints and domains, or a tool for simplifying reasoning by constraining the range of the statements being considered. We show, how it may also be used as a way of expressing more complicated interrelationships between terms, and discuss the import of this fact for authoring ontologies.