We show how to interoperate, semantically and inferentially, between the leading Semantic Web approaches to rules (RuleML Logic Programs) and ontologies (OWL/DAML+OIL Description Logic) via analyzing their expressive intersection. To do so, we define a new intermediate knowledge representation (KR) contained within this intersection: Description Logic Programs (DLP), and the closely related Description Horn Logic (DHL) which is an expressive fragment of first-order logic (FOL). DLP provides a significant degree of expressiveness, substantially greater than the RDFSchema fragment of Description Logic.

Both OWL-DL and function-free Horn rules are decidable fragments of first-order logic with interesting, yet orthogonal expressive power. A combination of OWL-DL and rules is desirable for the Semantic Web; however, it might easily lead to the undecidability of interesting reasoning problems. Here, we present a decidable such combination where rules are required to be DL-safe: each variable in the rule is required to occur in a non-DL-atom in the rule body. We discuss the expressive power of such a combination and present an algorithm for query answering in the related logic SHIQ extended with DL-safe rules, based on a reduction to disjunctive programs.

Abstract. We introduce the OWL Plugin, a Semantic Web extension of the Protégé ontology development platform. The OWL Plugin can be used to edit ontologies in the Web Ontology Language (OWL), to access description logic reasoners, and to acquire instances for semantic markup. In many of these features, the OWL Plugin has created and facilitated new practices for building Semantic Web contents, often driven by the needs of and feedback from our users. Furthermore, Protégé’s flexible open-source platform means that it is easy to integrate customtailored components to build real-world applications. This document describes the architecture of the OWL Plugin, walks through its most important features, and discusses some of our design decisions. 1

OWL have, at their heart, the RDF graph. Jena2, a secondgeneration RDF toolkit, is similarly centered on the RDF graph. RDFS and OWL reasoning are seen as graph-to-graph transforms, producing graphs of virtual triples. Rich APIs are provided. The Model API includes support for other aspects of the RDF recommendations, such as containers and reification. The Ontology API includes support for RDFS and OWL, including advanced OWL Full support. Jena includes the de facto reference RDF/XML parser, and provides RDF/XML output using the full range of the rich RDF/XML grammar. N3 I/O is supported. RDF graphs can be stored in-memory or in databases. Jena's query language, RDQL, and the Web API are both offered for the next round of standardization.

Current Description Logic reasoning systems provide only limited support for debugging logically erroneous knowledge bases. In this paper we propose new non-standard reasoning services which we designed and implemented to pinpoint logical contradictions when developing the medical terminology DICE. We provide complete algorithms for unfoldable ACC-TBoxes based on minimisation of axioms using Boolean methods for minimal unsatisfiability-presening sub-TBoxes, and an incomplete bottom-up method for generalised incoherence-preserving terminologies. 1

Conjunctive queries play an important role as an expressive query language for Description Logics (DLs). Although modern DLs usually provide for transitive roles, it was an open problem whether conjunctive query answering over DL knowledge bases is decidable if transitive roles are admitted in the query. In this paper, we consider conjunctive queries over knowledge bases formulated in the popular DL SHIQ and allow transitive roles in both the query and the knowledge base. We show that query answering is decidable and establish the following complexity bounds: regarding combined complexity, we devise a deterministic algorithm for query answering that needs time single exponential in the size of the KB and double exponential in the size of the query. Regarding data complexity, we prove co-NP-completeness. 1

Data complexity of reasoning in description logics (DLs) estimates the performance of reasoning algorithms measured in the size of the ABox only. We show that, even for the very expressive DL SHIQ, satisfiability checking is data complete for NP. For applications with large ABoxes, this can be a more accurate estimate than the usually considered combined complexity, which is EXPTIMEcomplete. Furthermore, we identify an expressive fragment, Horn-SHIQ, which is data complete for P, thus being very appealing for practical usage.

Ontology mapping is important when working with more than one ontology. Typically similarity considerations are the basis for this. In this paper an approach to integrate various similarity methods is presented. In brief, we determine similarity through rules which have been encoded by ontology experts.

In this paper, we describe our initial implementation of the KAoS policy and domain services. While initially oriented to the dynamic and complex requirements of software agent applications, the services are also being adapted to general-purpose grid computing and web services environments as well. The KAoS services rely on a DAML description-logic-based ontology of the computational environment, application context, and the policies themselves that enables runtime extensibility and adaptability of the system, as well as the ability to analyze policies relating to entities described at different levels of abstraction. An online theorem-prover is used for policy disclosure, conflict detection, and harmonization, and for reasoning about domain structure and concepts. In future versions, DAML will be replaced by OWL, and description-logic will be supplemented with the possibility of rule-based representation.

In this paper we describe Racer, which can be considered as a core inference engine for the semantic web. The Racer inference server o#ers two APIs that are already used by at least three di#erent network clients, i.e., the ontology editor OilEd, the visualization tool RICE, and the ontology development environment Protege 2. The Racer server supports the standard DIG protocol via HTTP and a TCP based protocol with extensive query facilities. Racer currently supports the web ontology languages DAML+OIL, RDF, and OWL.