Description Logic Programs: A Practical Choice For the Modelling of Ontologies

Knowledge representation using ontologies constitutes the heart of semantic technologies. Despite successful standardization efforts by the W3C, however, there are still numerous different ontology representation languages being used, and interoperability between them is in general not given. The problem is aggrevated by the fact that current standards lay foundations only and are well-known to be insufficient for the modelling of finer details. Thus, a plethora of extensions of the basic languages is being proposed, rendering the picture of ontology representation languages to be chaotic, to say the least. While semantic technologies start to become applicable and are being applied in adjacent areas of research and in research projects with industrial participation, and can soon be expected to become an integral part of industrial applications, the practitioner is faced with the difficult task of choosing his basic ontology representation paradigm. We will argue that the OWL subset known as Description Logic Programs constitutes a very reasonable choice.