Tractable Diversity: Scalable Multiperspective Ontology Management via Standpoint EL

TL;DR

This paper introduces Standpoint EL, a multi-modal extension of EL for representing diverse perspectives in ontologies, maintaining tractability while accommodating complex features.

Contribution

It presents Standpoint EL, enabling scalable, multi-perspective ontology management with hierarchical contexts, preserving PTime reasoning for core features.

Findings

Standpoint EL retains EL's PTime reasoning complexity.

Adding features like empty standpoints and nominals increases reasoning complexity.

The approach supports large, context-dependent ontologies with multiple perspectives.

Abstract

The tractability of the lightweight description logic EL has allowed for the construction of large and widely used ontologies that support semantic interoperability. However, comprehensive domains with a broad user base are often at odds with strong axiomatisations otherwise useful for inferencing, since these are usually context-dependent and subject to diverging perspectives. In this paper we introduce Standpoint EL, a multi-modal extension of EL that allows for the integrated representation of domain knowledge relative to diverse, possibly conflicting standpoints (or contexts), which can be hierarchically organised and put in relation to each other. We establish that Standpoint EL still exhibits EL's favourable PTime standard reasoning, whereas introducing additional features like empty standpoints, rigid roles, and nominals makes standard reasoning tasks intractable.