Eliminating concepts and roles from ontologies in expressive descriptive logics
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Author(s)
Wang, Kewen
Wang, Zhe
Topor, Rodney
Pan, Jeff Z
Antoniou, Grigoris
Year published
2014
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Forgetting is an important tool for reducing ontologies by eliminating some redundant concepts and roles while preserving sound and complete reasoning. Attempts have previously been made to address the problem of forgetting in relatively simple description logics (DLs), such as DL-Lite and extended EL. However, the issue of forgetting for ontologies in more expressive DLs, such as ALC and OWL DL, is largely unexplored. In particular, the problem of characterizing and computing forgetting for such logics is still open. In this paper, we first define semantic forgetting about concepts and roles in ALC ontologies and state ...
View more >Forgetting is an important tool for reducing ontologies by eliminating some redundant concepts and roles while preserving sound and complete reasoning. Attempts have previously been made to address the problem of forgetting in relatively simple description logics (DLs), such as DL-Lite and extended EL. However, the issue of forgetting for ontologies in more expressive DLs, such as ALC and OWL DL, is largely unexplored. In particular, the problem of characterizing and computing forgetting for such logics is still open. In this paper, we first define semantic forgetting about concepts and roles in ALC ontologies and state several important properties of forgetting in this setting. We then define the result of forgetting for concept descriptions in ALC, state the properties of forgetting for concept descriptions, and present algorithms for computing the result of forgetting for concept descriptions. Unlike the case of DL-Lite, the result of forgetting for an ALC ontology does not exist in general, even for the special case of forgetting in TBoxes. This makes the problem of computing the result of forgetting in ALC more challenging. We address this problem by defining a series of approximations to the result of forgetting for ALC ontologies and studying their properties. Our algorithms for computing approximations can be directly implemented as a plug-in of an ontology editor to enhance its ability of managing and reasoning in (large) ontologies.
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View more >Forgetting is an important tool for reducing ontologies by eliminating some redundant concepts and roles while preserving sound and complete reasoning. Attempts have previously been made to address the problem of forgetting in relatively simple description logics (DLs), such as DL-Lite and extended EL. However, the issue of forgetting for ontologies in more expressive DLs, such as ALC and OWL DL, is largely unexplored. In particular, the problem of characterizing and computing forgetting for such logics is still open. In this paper, we first define semantic forgetting about concepts and roles in ALC ontologies and state several important properties of forgetting in this setting. We then define the result of forgetting for concept descriptions in ALC, state the properties of forgetting for concept descriptions, and present algorithms for computing the result of forgetting for concept descriptions. Unlike the case of DL-Lite, the result of forgetting for an ALC ontology does not exist in general, even for the special case of forgetting in TBoxes. This makes the problem of computing the result of forgetting in ALC more challenging. We address this problem by defining a series of approximations to the result of forgetting for ALC ontologies and studying their properties. Our algorithms for computing approximations can be directly implemented as a plug-in of an ontology editor to enhance its ability of managing and reasoning in (large) ontologies.
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Journal Title
Computational Intelligence
Volume
30
Issue
2
Copyright Statement
© 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. This is the author-manuscript version of the following article: Eliminating concepts and roles from ontologies in expressive description logics, Computational Intelligence, Volume 30, Issue 2, 2014, pages 205–232, which has been published in final form at dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8640.2012.00442.x.
Subject
Artificial intelligence not elsewhere classified
Theory of computation
Information systems
Information and computing sciences