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A Tableau Decision Procedure for \(\mathcal{SHOIQ}\)

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Abstract

OWL DL, a new W3C ontology language recommendation, is based on the expressive description logic \(\mathcal{SHOIN}\). Although the ontology consistency problem for \(\mathcal{SHOIN}\) is known to be decidable, up to now there has been no known “practical” decision procedure, that is, a goal-directed procedure that is likely to perform well with realistic ontology derived problems. We present such a decision procedure for \(\mathcal{SHOIQ}\), a slightly more expressive logic than \(\mathcal{SHOIN}\), extending the well-known algorithm for \(\mathcal{SHIQ}\), which is the basis for several highly successful implementations.

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

    Ian Horrocks & Ulrike Sattler

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  1. Ian Horrocks
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  2. Ulrike Sattler
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Correspondence to Ulrike Sattler.

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Horrocks, I., Sattler, U. A Tableau Decision Procedure for \(\mathcal{SHOIQ}\) . J Autom Reasoning 39, 249–276 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10817-007-9079-9

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