Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2009, Volume 5663/2009, 84-99, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-02959-2_6

Axiom Pinpointing in Lightweight Description Logics via Horn-SAT Encoding and Conflict Analysis

Roberto Sebastiani and Michele Vescovi

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Abstract

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.

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