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Ontologies and Rules

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Handbook on Ontologies

Part of the book series: International Handbooks on Information Systems ((INFOSYS))

Summary

Ontologies and rules are two established paradigms in knowledge modelling, and play an important role for the Semantic Web. In this chapter, we present an introduction to common approaches for combining OWL ontologies and rules. In particular, we cover the Semantic Web Rules Language SWRL and Description Logic Programs DLP, and give pointers to the literature.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.w3.org/Submission/SWRL/

  2. 2.

    http://www.ruleml.org/

  3. 3.

    In addition to the forms directly below, SWRL also allows for “built-in” atoms which are discussed in Sect. 2.3.

  4. 4.

    As in the SWRL submission.

  5. 5.

    For a basic discussion of the standard translation in a modal logic context, see chapter “Ontologies in F-Logic” of [1]. For variants of the standard translation for SHOIN(D) and other description logis see [33] and [16].

  6. 6.

    Class and property equivalence axioms can be defined as a pair of inclusion axioms.

  7. 7.

    Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for some clarifications on this point.

  8. 8.

    We presume normal Datalog safety, i.e. that every variable in the head appears in the body.

  9. 9.

    http://www.w3.org/Submission/2006/SUBM-owl11-tractable-20061219/

  10. 10.

    http://www.w3.org/2007/OWL/

  11. 11.

    We would like to mention that it has been argued whether this analysis is appropriate.

  12. 12.

    http://www.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/about.html

  13. 13.

    http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2007/06/15/how-owlimport-is-used/

  14. 14.

    In our terminology, the set of OWL Lite statements \(\{C \sqsubseteq D \sqcup E,D \equiv E\}\) would not qualify as a set of DLP statements, although it is semantically equivalent to \(\{C \sqsubseteq D,D \equiv E\}\), which is expressible in DLP. We are well aware of this restriction, but will not be concerned with it in the moment, because this more general notion of semantic equivalence is not readily accessible by syntactic means. Note, however, that C⊑D⊔D qualifies as a DLP statement, since it is semantically equivalent to C⊑D.

  15. 15.

    Note that – since we have non-disjunctive rules – the only effect of integrity constraints is that they can render the knowledge base to be inconsistent. Equality also needs some explanations: The theorem assumes that we do not use the unique name assumption, and equality thus has the same meaning as it has under OWL DL, e.g. two different constants can be equal, meaning that they denote the same individual.

  16. 16.

    However, Horn--SHIQ lies within the proposed OWL 2 language, see http://www.w3.org/Submission/owl11-tractable/

  17. 17.

    http://kaon2.semanticweb.org/

  18. 18.

    http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~bmotik/HermiT/

  19. 19.

    Using, e.g. XSB-Prolog, http://xsb.sourceforge.net/

  20. 20.

    See http://www.businessrulesgroup.org/brmanifesto.htm for a taste of business rule concerns.

  21. 21.

    http://www.w3.org/2005/rules/wg

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Acknowledgement

The first named author acknowledges support by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft under the ReaSem project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. AIFB, Universität Karlsruhe (TH), Karlsruhe, Germany

    Pascal Hitzler

  2. University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Bijan Parsia

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  1. Pascal Hitzler
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Correspondence to Pascal Hitzler .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Inst. Informatik, Universität Koblenz-Landau, Universitaetsstr. 1, Koblenz, 56016, Germany

    Steffen Staab

  2. Inst. Angewandte Informatik und, Universität Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, 76128, Germany

    Rudi Studer

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Hitzler, P., Parsia, B. (2009). Ontologies and Rules. In: Staab, S., Studer, R. (eds) Handbook on Ontologies. International Handbooks on Information Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-92673-3_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-92673-3_5

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