Modular Combination of Reasoners for Ontology Classification

Classification is a fundamental reasoning task in ontology design, and there is currently a wide range of reasoners highly optimised for classification of SROIQ ontologies. Existing reasoners, however, do not exploit the fact that most of the axioms in many realistic SROIQ ontologies are expressed in some lightweight DL, such as EL. In this paper, we propose a novel reasoning technique that allows us to completely classify a large subset of the signature of a SROIQ ontology by relying only on a reasoner for a given lightweight DL. We also show how this information can then be exploited by the fully-fledged SROIQ reasoner HermiT to complete the classification of the ontology.