Abstract
A major challenge in knowledge representation is to manage the access to knowledge: users should not be presented with knowledge that is irrelevant to their topic of interest, or have no right to access.
Two general strategies exist for providing access restrictions: (1) the ontology engineers describe the conditions that allow access to specific fragments of the ontology, or (2) fragments are automatically identified through their logical properties. The former is prone to miss logical connections between axioms, while the latter can fail to capture relevant knowledge that has no logical connection with the topic of interest.
We define the Context-Oriented Decomposition (COD) of an ontology as a technique that combines the benefits of both approaches: it allows authors to identify relevant fragments, while guaranteeing the strong semantic properties of the logic-based Atomic Decomposition.