The recent quest for tractable logic-based languages arising from the field of bio-medical ontologies has raised a lot of
attention on
lightweight (i.e. less expressive but tractable) description logics, like
EL\mathcal{EL} and its family. To this extent, automated reasoning techniques in these logics have been developed for computing not only
concept subsumptions, but also to pinpoint the set of axioms causing each subsumption. In this paper we build on previous
work from the literature and we propose and investigate a simple and novel approach for axiom pinpointing for the logic
EL+\mathcal{EL^{+}}. The idea is to encode the classification of an ontology into a Horn propositional formula, and to exploit the power of Boolean
Constraint Propagation and Conflict Analysis from modern SAT solvers to compute concept subsumptions and to perform axiom
pinpointing. A preliminary empirical evaluation confirms the potential of the approach.
The first author is partly supported by SRC under GRC Custom Research Project 2009-TJ-1880 WOLFLING, and by MIUR under PRIN
project 20079E5KM8_002.