Towards Ontology-Mediated Planning with OWL DL Ontologies (Extended Version)

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel approach for ontology-mediated planning that separates planning specifications from ontologies, enabling easier integration, and rewrites the problem into classical planning for existing tools, optimized for small domains.

Contribution

It presents a new interface-based method for ontology-mediated planning that supports OWL DL and is data-dependent, differing from existing integrated approaches.

Findings

Rewrites ontology-mediated planning problems into classical planning.

Supports the entire OWL DL fragment.

Shows promising results with small domain problems.

Abstract

While classical planning languages make the closed-domain and closed-world assumption, there have been various approaches to extend those with DL reasoning, which is then interpreted under the usual open-world semantics. Current approaches for planning with DL ontologies integrate the DL directly into the planning language, and practical approaches have been developed based on first-order rewritings or rewritings into datalog. We present here a new approach in which the planning specification and ontology are kept separate, and are linked together using an interface. This allows planning experts to work in a familiar formalism, while existing ontologies can be easily integrated and extended by ontology experts. Our approach for planning with those ontology-mediated planning problems is optimized for cases with comparatively small domains, and supports the whole OWL DL fragment. The idea is to rewrite the ontology-mediated planning problem into a classical planning problem to be processed by existing planning tools. Different to other approaches, our rewriting is data-dependent. A first experimental evaluation of our approach shows the potential and limitations of this approach.