Reducing OWL Entailment to Description Logic Satisfiability

I. Horrocks¹ and Peter F. Patel-Schneider²

¹Department of Computer Science
University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester M13 9PL, UK

²Network Data and Services Research Department
Bell Laboratories
600 Mountain Ave., 2A-427
Murray Hill, NJ 07974, USA

Abstract

We show how to reduce ontology entailment for the OWL DL and OWL Lite ontology languages to knowledge base satisfiability in (respectively) the SHOIN(D) and SHIF(D) description logics. This is done by first establishing a correspondence between OWL ontologies and description logic knowledge bases and then by showing how knowledge base entailment can be reduced to knowledge base satisfiability.

Research Paper at 2nd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2003), 20-23 October 2003, Sundial Resort, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA.