Ontology driven architecture has revolutionized the inference system by allowing interoperability and efficient reasoning between heterogeneous multivendors systems. Sound reasoning support is highly important for sound semantic web ontologies which can only be possible if state-of-the-art Description Logic Reasoners were capable enough to identify inconsistency and classify taxonomy in ontolog...

We propose a description-logic style extension of OWL 2 with nominal schemas which can be used like“variable nominal classes”within axioms. This feature allows ontology languages to express arbitrary DL-safe rules (as expressible in SWRL or RIF) in their native syntax. We show that adding nominal schemas to OWL 2 does not increase the worst-case reasoning complexity, and we identify a novel tra...

Recently, there has been an increased amount of attention dedicated to WS-Policy it has become a W3C submission and a working group was formed to standardize the specification. In our previous work, we provided a mapping of WS-Policy to OWL-DL. In this paper, we continue that work by analyzing the operation of policy intersection (determining whether two web service policies are compatible). We...

In this paper, we investigate incrementally updating classifications of ontologies encoded in the expressive description logic SHOIN (D), which also corresponds to the W3C standard Web Ontology Language, OWL-DL. In particular we present various optimizations for incremental classification under both axiom addition and removal. Several of the optimizations are independent of the logic and proof ...

The rapid increase in the number and use of biological ontologies necessitates developing systems for their integration. In this paper we present a core ontology for biology, and outline its application for integrating biological domain ontologies. Our ontology rests on a foundational ontology, which offers higher-order categories and a theory of levels of reality. The core ontology is implemen...

The rapid increase in the number and use of biological ontologies necessitates developing systems for their integration. In this paper we present a core ontology for biology, and outline its application for integrating biological domain ontologies. Our ontology rests on a foundational ontology, which offers higher-order categories and a theory of levels of reality. The core ontology is implemen...

A number of ontology reasoners have been developed for reasoning over highly expressive ontology languages such as OWL DL and OWL 2 DL. Such languages have, as a consequence of high expressivity, high worst-case complexity. Therefore, reasoning tasks such as classification sometimes take considerable time on large and complex ontologies. In this paper, we carry out a comprehensive comparative s...

This paper presents an approach for visually modeling OWL DL and OWL Full ontologies based on the well-established visual modeling language UML. We discuss a metamodel for OWL based on the Meta-Object Facility, an associated UML profile as visual syntax, and transformations between both. The work we present supports modeldriven development of OWL ontologies and is currently undergoing the stand...

The TOWL language is a temporal ontology language built on top of OWL-DL that enables descriptions involving time and temporal aspects such as change and state transitions. Extending OWL-DL into a temporal context does not only relate to providing the adequate expressiveness for such a goal, but also ensuring that static concepts preserve their meaning in a temporal environment. One such concep...

The RDF collections and containers is one of the most used features by RDF technicians and practitioners. Although some work has been published in past, there is not a standard and accepted way for defining collections within OWL DL frameworks. Here, we attempt to address this issue with the introduction of the Collections Ontology (CO) version 2.0. CO is an OWL 2 DL ontology developed for crea...