Closed World Reasoning in the Semantic Web through Epistemic

Closed World Reasoning in the Semantic Web through Epistemic Operators Stephan Grimm and Boris Motik FZI Research Center for Information Technologies at the University of Karlsruhe Karlsruhe, Germany {grimm,motik}@fzi.de Abstract. The open world assumption makes OWL principally suit- able to handle incomplete knowledge in Semantic Web scenarios, how- ever, some scenarios desire closed world reasoning. Autoepistemic de- scription logics allow to realise closed world reasoning in open world set- tings through epistemic operators. An extension of OWL by epistemic operators therefore allows for non-monotonic features known from closed world systems, such as default rules, integrity constraints or epistemic querying. These features can be beneficially applied in Semantic Web scenarios, where OWL lacks expressiveness. 1 Introduction An important goal in the design of the Ontology Web Language (OWL) [8] was to produce a language with a well-defined formal semantics. This goal was achieved by basing the semantics on description logics (DL) [2]. The DLs underlying OWL are actually fragments of first-order logic, so they employ the so-called open world assumption (OWA) [6]. Under OWA, failure to derive a fact does not imply the opposite. For example, assume we only know that Peter is a person. From this information we can neither conclude that Peter is a vegetarian, nor that he is not one. Hence, we admit the fact that our knowledge of the world is incomplete. The open world assumption is closely related to the monotonic nature of first-order logic: adding new information never falsifies a previous conclusion. Namely, if we subsequently learn that Peter is indeed a vegetarian, this does not change