Reasoning in the OWL 2 Full Ontology Language using First-Order Automated Theorem Proving

TL;DR

This paper translates a large fragment of OWL 2 Full semantics into first-order logic and applies automated theorem proving, demonstrating promising results for effective reasoning beyond current Semantic Web reasoners.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach of translating OWL 2 Full semantics into first-order logic and using automated theorem proving for reasoning tasks.

Findings

Automated theorem proving can handle a large fragment of OWL 2 Full.

The approach outperforms existing Semantic Web reasoners in certain reasoning tasks.

The method shows practical potential for OWL reasoning in complex ontologies.

Abstract

OWL 2 has been standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as a family of ontology languages for the Semantic Web. The most expressive of these languages is OWL 2 Full, but to date no reasoner has been implemented for this language. Consistency and entailment checking are known to be undecidable for OWL 2 Full. We have translated a large fragment of the OWL 2 Full semantics into first-order logic, and used automated theorem proving systems to do reasoning based on this theory. The results are promising, and indicate that this approach can be applied in practice for effective OWL reasoning, beyond the capabilities of current Semantic Web reasoners. This is an extended version of a paper with the same title that has been published at CADE 2011, LNAI 6803, pp. 446-460. The extended version provides appendices with additional resources that were used in the reported evaluation.