Optimizing Description Logic Reasoning with Nominals.pdf

Optimizing Description Logic Reasoning with Nominals: First Results Evren Sirin, Bernardo Cuenca Grau, Bijan Parsia Maryland Information and Network Dynamics Lab. 8400 Baltimore Av. College Park, MD, 20740 USA evren@, bernardo@, bparsia@ Abstract OWL-DL is a World Wide Web Consortium standard for repre- senting ontologies on the Semantic Web. It can be seen as a syntactic variant of the Description Logic SHOIN (D), with an OWL-DL on- tology corresponding to a SHOIN (D) knowledge base. The very recent accomplishment of a decision procedure for SHOIN (D) poses the challenge of turning the decision procedure into a practical imple- mentation. In particular, we emphasize the need of new optimization techniques for nominals, especially in the presence of large number of individuals in the KB. In this paper, we present new techniques for optimizing DL reason- ing in the presence of nominals in the TBox and individuals in a large ABox. We have integrated our optimizations in the open-source Pel- let reasoner, which is sound and complete for SHOIN (D), and found that they suffice for efficiently classifying the famous Wine Ontology. We also show that these optimization techniques produce significant performance improvements in other widely used ontologies containing nominals, such as the OWL-S and AKT ontologies. 1 Introduction and Motivation OWL-DL became a World Wide Web Consortium standard for representing ontologies on the Semantic Web in Feburary, 2004. As the group approached completion, there were two deep controversies with regard to the expressivity of the language: first, there was, at that point, no decision procedure for OWL-DL, a language many