Towards Incremental Reasoning Through Updates in OWL-DL

In this paper, we investigate incrementally updating classifications of ontologies encoded in the expressive description logic SHOIN (D), which also corresponds to the W3C standard Web Ontology Language, OWL-DL. In particular we present various optimizations for incremental classification under both axiom addition and removal. Several of the optimizations are independent of the logic and proof theory as long as classification can be reduced to satisfiability testing. Additionally, we provide an empirical analysis of the optimizations through an experimental implementation in the Pellet OWL-DL reasoner.