The Knowledge Cartography - A New Approach to Reasoning over Description Logics Ontologies

The paper presents a new method for representation and processing ontological knowledge – Knowledge Cartography. This method allows for inferring implicit knowledge from both: terminological part (TBox) and assertional part (ABox) of a Description Logic ontology. The paper describes basics of the method and gives some theoretical background of the method. Knowledge Cartography stores and processes ontologies in terms of binary signatures, which gives efficient way of querying ontologies containing numerous individuals. Knowledge Cartography has been applied in KASEA – a knowledge management system that is being developed in course of a European integrated research project called PIPS. Results of efficiency experiments and ideas of further development of the system are presented and discussed.