Auxiliary Components

The Camelot system architecture allows for other reasoning and auxiliary components to be integrated with the basic DL reasoning component. Such components could include, for example:

• An ABox reasoner. This component reasons with assertions about individuals and their interrelationships. It might be useful for those more familiar with databases to think of the concept reasoning component (TBox) as dealing with schema design, while the ABox deals with concrete data. An algorithm for reasoning with ABoxes in the FaCT logic has already been designed, and work on an optimised implementation is currently underway. Details of the algorithm design can be found in:

S. Tessaris. Questions and answers: reasoning and querying in Description Logic. PhD thesis, University of Manchester, 2001.
Compressed PS
 

• An explanation component. It has been suggested that the utility of DL systems can be enhanced by providing users, in particular those designing conceptual schemata, with an explanation of the reasoning process which led to the discovery of an implicit subclass-superclass relationship. Theoretical work on the development of such a system for tableaux algorithms (such as those used in the Camelot system) is underway. More details can be found in:

A. Borgida, E. Franconi, I. Horrocks, D. McGuinness, and P. F. Patel-Schneider. Explaining ALC subsumption. In P. Lambrix, A. Borgida, M. Lenzerini, R. Möller, and P. Patel-Schneider, editors, Proceedings of the International Workshop on Description Logics (DL'99), pages 37-40, 1999.
BibTeX entry, Compressed PS