Well-founded semantics for description logic programs in the semantic web

  • Authors:

  • Thomas Eiter;Giovambattista Ianni;Thomas Lukasiewicz;Roman Schindlauer

  • Affiliations:

  • Technische Universität Wien, Austria;Università della Calabria, Rende, Italy;University of Oxford and Technische Universität Wien, Austria;Technische Universität Wien, Austria

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Computational Logic (TOCL)
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

The realization of the Semantic Web vision, in which computational logic has a prominent role, has stimulated a lot of research on combining rules and ontologies, which are formulated in different formalisms. In particular, combining logic programming with the Web Ontology Language (OWL), which is a standard based on description logics, emerged as an important issue for linking the Rules and Ontology Layers of the Semantic Web. Nonmonotonic description logic programs (dl-programs) were introduced for such a combination, in which a pair (L,P) of a description logic knowledge base L and a set of rules P with negation as failure is given a model-based semantics that generalizes the answer set semantics of logic programs. In this article, we reconsider dl-programs and present a well-founded semantics for them as an analog for the other main semantics of logic programs. It generalizes the canonical definition of the well-founded semantics based on unfounded sets, and, as we show, lifts many of the well-known properties from ordinary logic programs to dl-programs. Among these properties, our semantics amounts to a partial model approximating the answer set semantics, which yields for positive and stratified dl-programs, a total model coinciding with the answer set semantics; it has polynomial data complexity provided the access to the description logic knowledge base is polynomial; under suitable restrictions, it has lower complexity and even first-order rewritability is achievable. The results add to previous evidence that dl-programs are a versatile and robust combination approach, which moreover is implementable using legacy engines.