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Representing and reasoning on contexts is an open problem in the semantic web. Despite the fact that context representation has for a long time been treated locally by semantic web practitioners, a recognized and widely accepted consensus regarding the way of encoding and particularly reasoning on contextual knowledge has not yet been reached by far. In this paper, we present OWL^C : a contextual two-dimensional web ontology language. Using the first dimension, we can reason on contexts-dependent classes, properties, and axioms and using the second dimension, we can reason on knowledge about contexts which we consider formal objects, as proposed by McCarthy [McCarthy, 1987]. We demonstrate the modeling strength and reasoning capabilities of OWL^C with a practical scenario from the digital humanity domain. We chose the Ferdinand de Saussure [Joseph, 2012] use case in virtue of its inherent contextual nature, as well as its notable complexity which allows us to highlight many issues connected with contextual knowledge representation and reasoning.
@InProceedings{aljalbout_et_al:OASIcs.LDK.2019.2,
  author =	{Aljalbout, Sahar and Buchs, Didier and Falquet, Gilles},
  title =	{{OWL^C: A Contextual Two-Dimensional Web Ontology Language}},
  booktitle =	{2nd Conference on Language, Data and Knowledge (LDK 2019)},
  pages =	{2:1--2:13},
  series =	{Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-105-4},
  ISSN =	{2190-6807},
  year =	{2019},
  volume =	{70},
  editor =	{Eskevich, Maria and de Melo, Gerard and F\"{a}th, Christian and McCrae, John P. and Buitelaar, Paul and Chiarcos, Christian and Klimek, Bettina and Dojchinovski, Milan},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/OASIcs.LDK.2019.2},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-103666},
  doi =		{10.4230/OASIcs.LDK.2019.2},
  annote =	{Keywords: Contextual Reasoning, OWL^C, Contexts in digital humanities}
}