Rewriting Rules into SROIQ Axioms

Description Logics are a family of very expressive logics but some forms of knowledge are much more intuitive to formulate otherwise, say, as rules. Rules in DL can be dealt with two approaches: (i) use rules as they are knowing that it leads to undecidability. (ii) or make the rules DL-safe, which will restrict their semantic impact and, e.g., loose the nice “car owners are engine owners” inference. Here, we offer a third possibility: we rewrite the rule, if it satisfies certain restrictions, into a set of axioms which preserves the nice inferences. In this paper, we describe the rewriting technique and prove that it does really preserve the semantics of the rule. We have implemented the rewriting algorithm and have practical results.