This work is motivated by a real-world case study where it is necessary to integrate and relate existing ontologies through meta-modelling. For this, we introduce the Description Logic SHIQM which is obtained from SHIQ by adding statements that equate individuals to concepts in a knowledge base. In this new extension, concepts can be individuals of another concept (called meta-concept) which itself can be an individual of yet another concept (called meta–meta-concept) and so on. We define an algorithm that checks consistency of SHIQM by modifying the Tableau algorithm for SHIQ. From the practical point of view, this has the advantage that we can reuse the code of existing OWL reasoners. From the theoretical point of view, it has a similar advantage of reuse. We make use of the existing results and proofs that lead to correctness of the algorithm for SHIQ in order to prove correctness of the algorithm for SHIQM.

Web site recommendation systems help to get high quality information. The modeling of recommendation system involves the combination of many features: metrics of quality, quality criteria, recommendation criteria, user profile, specific domain concepts, among others. At the moment of the specification of a recommendation system it must be guaranteed a right interrelation of all of these features. In this paper, we propose an ontology network based process for web site recommendation modeling. The ontology network conceptualizes the different domains (web site domain, quality assurance domain, user context domain, recommendation criteria domain, specific domain) in a set of interrelated ontologies. Basically, this work introduces the semantic relationships that were used to construct this ontology network. Moreover, it shows the usefulness of this ontology network for the detection of possible inconsistencies when specifying recommendation criteria. Particularly, this approach is illustrated for the health domain.