A Tableau-Based Explainer for DL Subsumption

This paper describes the implementation of a tableau-based reasoning component which is capable of providing quasi natural language explanations for subsumptions within ALEHFR+ TBoxes. 1 Motivation W3C’s recently recommended ontology language OWL is expected to be used even by non-sophisticated end users. However, the Description Logics (DLs) underlying OWL Lite (SHIF) and OWL DL (SHOIN) are quite expressive [1]. Authoring ontologies presumably is not possible without a basic understanding of the underlying reasoning services. Our explainer Mex1 aims at supporting a deeper comprehension of subsumption, the core inference service, by providing an on-demand step by step quasi-natural language explanation. Mex is capable of explaining subsumptions within a significant fraction of the DL underlying OWL Lite, namely definitorial ALEHFR+ TBoxes with global domain and range restrictions. Such TBoxes require all axioms to be of the form A D or A ≡ D, with A atomic and unique. The languag...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: TABLEAUX
• Authors: Thorsten Liebig, Michael Halfmann
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Dl Underlying Owl, Language Explanation, OWL Lite, TABLEAUX 2005