Reducing OWL Entailment to Description Logic Satisfiability.

Reducing OWL Entailment to Description Logic Satisfiability Ian Horrocks Department of Computer Science University of Manchester, Manchester, UK Peter F. Patel-Schneider Bell Labs Research, Lucent Technologies Murray Hill, NJ, USA Abstract We show how to reduce ontology entailment for the OWL DL and OWL Lite ontol- ogy languages to knowledge base satisfiability in (respectively) the and description logics. 1 Introduction The aim of the Semantic Web is to make web resources (not just HTML pages, but a wide range of web accessible data and services) more readily accessible to automated processes. According to widely known proposals for a Semantic Web architecture, ontologies will play a key role as they will be used as a source of shared and precisely defined terms that can be used in such metadata [8]. The importance of ontologies in semantic markup has prompted the development of several ontology languages specifically designed for this purpose, leading up to OWL [2], currently being developed by the W3C Web Ontology working group. Reasoning with ontology languages will be important in the Semantic Web if applications are to exploit the semantics of ontology based metadata annotations. It is thus useful to make connections between OWL and logics that have effective reasoners. In this paper we will show that the main reasoning problem (ontology entailment) in OWL DL and OWL Lite (two subsets of OWL) can be reduced to knowledge base (KB) satisfiability in the and description logics respectively. This is a significant result from both a theoretical and a practical perspective: it demonstrates that computing ontology entailment in OWL DL (r