The OWL Web Ontology Language is a new formal language for representing ontologies in the Semantic Web. OWL has features from several families of representation languages, including primarily Description Logics and frames. OWL also shares many characteristics with RDF, the W3C base of the Semantic Web. In this paper we discuss how the philosophy and features of OWL can be traced back to these older formalisms, with modifications driven by several other constraints on OWL. Several interesting problems...

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Both OWL-DL and function-free Horn rules are decidable fragments of first-order logic with interesting, yet orthogonal expressive power. A combination of OWL-DL and rules is desirable for the Semantic Web; however, it might easily lead to the undecidability of interesting reasoning problems. Here, we present a decidable such combination where rules are required to be DL-safe: each variable in the rule is required to occur in a non-DL-atom in the rule body. We discuss the expressive power of such a combination and present an algorithm for query answering in the related logic SHIQ extended with DL-safe rules, based on a reduction to disjunctive programs.

Recently, it has been shown that the small description logic (DL) EL, which allows for conjunction and existential restrictions, has better algorithmic properties than its counterpart FL0, which allows for conjunction and value restrictions. Whereas the subsumption problem in FL0 becomes already intractable in the presence of acyclic TBoxes, it remains tractable in EL even with general concept inclusion axioms (GCIs). On the one hand, we extend the positive result for EL by identifying a set of expressive means that can be added to EL without sacrificing tractability. On the other hand, we show that basically all other additions of typical DL constructors to EL with GCIs make subsumption intractable, and in most cases even EXPTIMEcomplete. In addition, we show that subsumption in FL0 with GCIs is EXPTIME-complete.

Description logics are a family of knowledge representation formalisms that are descended from semantic networks and frames via the system Kl-one. During the last decade, it has been shown that the important reasoning problems (like subsumption and satisfiability) in a great variety of description logics can be decided using tableau-like algorithms. This is not very surprising since description logics have turned out to be closely related to propositional modal logics and logics of programs (such as propositional dynamic logic), for which tableau procedures have been quite successful. Nevertheless, due to different underlying intuitions and applications, most description logics differ significantly from run-of-the-mill modal and program logics. Consequently, the research on tableau algorithms in description logics led to new techniques and results, which are, however, also of interest for modal logicians. In this article, we will focus on three features that play an important role in description logics (number restrictions, terminological axioms, and role constructors), and show how they can be taken into account by tableau algorithms.

Description Logics (DLs) are a family of knowledge representation formalisms mainly characterised by constructors to build complex concepts and roles from atomic ones. Expressive role constructors are important in many applications, but can be computationally problematical. We present an algorithm that decides satisfiability of the DL ALC extended with transitive and inverse roles and functional restrictions with respect to general concept inclusion axioms and role hierarchies; early experiments indicate that this algorithm is well-suited for implementation. Additionally, we show that ALC extended with just transitive and inverse roles is still in PSpace. We investigate the limits of decidability for this family of DLs, showing that relaxing the constraints placed on the kinds of roles used in number restrictions leads to the undecidability of all inference problems. Finally, we describe a number of optimisation techniques that are crucial in obtaining implementations of the decision procedures, which, despite the hight worst-case complexity of the problem, exhibit good performance with real-life problems. 1

Description Logics (DLs) are suitable, well-known, logics for managing structured knowledge. They allow reasoning about individuals and well defined concepts, i.e. set of individuals with common properties. The experience in using DLs in applications has shown that in many cases we would like to extend their capabilities. In particular, their use in the context of Multimedia Information Retrieval (MIR) leads to the convincement that such DLs should allow the treatment of the inherent imprecision in multimedia object content representation and retrieval. In this paper we will present a fuzzy extension of ALC, combining...

The high computational complexity of advanced reasoning tasks such as reasoning about knowledge and planning calls for efficient and reliable algorithms for reasoning problems harder than NP. In this paper we propose Evaluate, an algorithm for evaluating Quantified Boolean Formulae, a language that extends propositional logic in a way such that many advanced forms of propositional reasoning, e.g., circumscription, can be easily formulated as evaluation of a QBF. Algorithms for evaluation of QBFs are suitable for the experimental analysis on a wide range of complexity classes, a property not easily found in other formalisms. Evaluate is based on a generalization of the Davis-Putnam procedure for SAT, and is guaranteed to work in polynomial space. Before presenting the algorithm, we discuss several abstract properties of QBFs that we singled out to make it more efficient. We also discuss various options that were investigated about heuristics and data structures, and report the main res...

OWL have, at their heart, the RDF graph. Jena2, a secondgeneration RDF toolkit, is similarly centered on the RDF graph. RDFS and OWL reasoning are seen as graph-to-graph transforms, producing graphs of virtual triples. Rich APIs are provided. The Model API includes support for other aspects of the RDF recommendations, such as containers and reification. The Ontology API includes support for RDFS and OWL, including advanced OWL Full support. Jena includes the de facto reference RDF/XML parser, and provides RDF/XML output using the full range of the rich RDF/XML grammar. N3 I/O is supported. RDF graphs can be stored in-memory or in databases. Jena's query language, RDQL, and the Web API are both offered for the next round of standardization.

The vision of a Semantic Web has recently drawn considerable attention, both from academia and industry. Description logics are often named as one of the tools that can support the Semantic Web and thus help to make this vision reality.