To enable ontology reuse, the Web Ontology Language (OWL) allows an ontology K_v to import an ontology tZh- To reason with such a K_v, a reasoner needs physical access to the axioms of K_h. For copyright and/or privacy reasons, however, the authors of K_h might not want to publish the axioms of K_vh; instead, they might prefer to provide an oracle that can answer a (limited) set of queries over K_h, thus allowing K_v to import K_h "by query." In this paper, we study import-by-query algorithms, which can answer questions about K_v ∪ K_h by accessing only K_v and the oracle. We show that no such algorithm exists in general, and present restrictions under which importing by query becomes feasible.
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