Reasonable Macros for Ontology Construction and Maintenance

Creating and maintaining ontology knowledge bases are difficult processes that can be improved by using macro or templating languages that help structure the ontology engineering task and reduce unnecessary repetitions of ontology patterns. However, since the templates themselves need to be created and maintained, suitable tool support for their maintenance is vital in order to ensure the quality of the resulting knowledge base, and to lower the cost of its construction and maintenance. In this paper, we show that a simple and powerful macro or templating language for description logic (DL) knowledge bases can be defined in description logic itself. In other words, DL allows for macros that are themselves DL knowledge bases; maintenance and debugging for such macros can therefore be done using existing DL reasoners, and does not require extra tool support. We define such macros for the DL SROIQ, which underlies the W3C standard OWL 2. We then show that notions of containment and other problems of interest for such macros become standard reasoning problems supported by existing reasoners. We explore the uses of such macros, showcase how they can be used as restricted higher-order queries, and apply our insights to the setting of data exchange.