Abstract. The OWL Web Ontology Language is a new formal language for representing ontologies in the Semantic Web. OWL has features from several families of representation languages, including primarily Description Logics and frames. OWL also shares many characteristics with RDF, the W3C base of the Semantic Web. In this paper we discuss how the philosophy and features of OWL can be traced back to these older formalisms, with modifications driven by several other constraints on OWL. Several interesting problems have arisen where these influences on OWL have clashed.

We show how to interoperate, semantically and inferentially, between the leading Semantic Web approaches to rules (RuleML Logic Programs) and ontologies (OWL/DAML+OIL Description Logic) via analyzing their expressive intersection. To do so, we define a new intermediate knowledge representation (KR) contained within this intersection: Description Logic Programs (DLP), and the closely related Description Horn Logic (DHL) which is an expressive fragment of first-order logic (FOL). DLP provides a significant degree of expressiveness, substantially greater than the RDFSchema fragment of Description Logic.We show how to perform DLP-fusion: the bidirectional translation of premises and inferences (including typical kinds of queries) from the DLP fragment of DL to LP, and vice versa from the DLP fragment of LP to DL. In particular, this translation enables one to "build rules on top of ontologies": it enables the rule KR to have access to DL ontological definitions for vocabulary primitives (e.g., predicates and individual constants) used by the rules. Conversely, the DLP-fusion technique likewise enables one to "build ontologies on top of rules": it enables ontological definitions to be supplemented by rules, or imported into DL from rules. It also enables available efficient LP inferencing algorithms/implementations to be exploited for reasoning over large-scale DL ontologies.

Abstract. This is a system description of the Description Logic reasoner FaCT++. The reasoner implements a tableaux decision procedure for the well known SHOIQ description logic, with additional support for datatypes, including strings and integers. The system employs a wide range of performance enhancing optimisations, including both standard techniques (such as absorption and model merging) and newly developed ones (such as ordering heuristics and taxonomic classification). FaCT++ can, via the standard DIG interface, be used to provide reasoning services for ontology engineering tools supporting the OWL DL ontology language.

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In this chapter, we introduce and explain the basic notions of Description Logic, including syntax, semantics and reasoning services, and we explain how the latter are used in applications. The concept language of the DL ALCIn this section, we will describe the central notions of Description Logic first on an intuitive level and then on a more precise level. As a running example, we use the domain of university courses and teaching, and we will use a conceptualisation given informally, in graphical form, in Figure 2.1. Please note that this is one way of viewing university teachingwhich might be very different from the reader's way of viewing it. Also, as it is an informal representation, different readers may interpret arrows in different ways; that is, our representation does not come with a well-defined semantics that would inform us in an unambiguous way how to interpret the different arrows. 1 In the next sections, we will describe our way of viewing university teaching in a DL knowledge base, thereby establishing some constraints on the meaning of terms like "Professor" and "teaches" used in Figure 2.1 and throughout this section.In Description Logic, we assume that we want to describe some abstraction of some domain of interest, and that this abstraction is populated by elements. 2 We use three main building blocks to describe these elements:• Concepts represent sets of elements and can be viewed as unary pred-1 Our graphical representation looks somewhat similar to an extended ER diagram, for which such a well-defined semantics has been specified [Che76, CLN94]. 2 We have chosen the term "elements" rather than "individuals" or "objects" to prevent the reader from making false assumptions.