Implementation and Evaluation of Forgetting in ALC-Ontologies

We implement and evaluate a recently introduced method to compute uniform interpolants for ontologies specified in the description logic ALC. The aim of uniform interpolation is to reformulate an ontology such that it only uses a specified set of symbols, while preserving consequences that involve these symbols. Uniform interpolation is useful to applications in ontology engineering and modular ontologies. It is known that uniform interpolants of ontologies in ALC cannot always be presented in a finite way, and that their size can in the worst case be triple exponential in the size of the original ontology. These properties leave the question on how practical computing uniform interpolants is. The aim of this paper is to approach this question by implementing our recently presented method that always computes a finite representation of the uniform interpolant – either by using fixpoint logics or by extending the signature – and by undertaking an experimental evaluation of the method on a larger set of real-life ontologies.