Efficient OWL2QL Meta-reasoning Using ASP-based Hybrid Knowledge Bases

TL;DR

This paper improves the efficiency of OWL2QL meta-reasoning by enhancing theoretical foundations and employing alternative tools for hybrid knowledge bases, enabling more practical reasoning with metamodeling features.

Contribution

It advances the reduction techniques for meta-reasoning in OWL2QL, providing a more solid theoretical basis and demonstrating competitive performance with new tools.

Findings

Improved reduction techniques for meta-reasoning

Enhanced theoretical foundations for hybrid knowledge bases

Demonstrated competitive performance with alternative tools

Abstract

Metamodeling refers to scenarios in ontologies in which classes and roles can be members of classes or occur in roles. This is a desirable modelling feature in several applications, but allowing it without restrictions is problematic for several reasons, mainly because it causes undecidability. Therefore, practical languages either forbid metamodeling explicitly or treat occurrences of classes as instances to be semantically different from other occurrences, thereby not allowing metamodeling semantically. Several extensions have been proposed to provide metamodeling to some extent. Building on earlier work that reduces metamodeling query answering to Datalog query answering, recently reductions to query answering over hybrid knowledge bases were proposed with the aim of using the Datalog transformation only where necessary. Preliminary work showed that the approach works, but the hoped-for performance improvements were not observed yet. In this work we expand on this body of work by improving the theoretical basis of the reductions and by using alternative tools that show competitive performance.