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

Abstract

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.