An epistemic operator for description logics
Artificial Intelligence
Bridging the gap between OWL and relational databases
Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web
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Data validation is an important part of data integration and analysis tasks. The consequences of having invalid data ranges from rather harmless application failures to serious errors in decision making process. Web Ontology Language (OWL) provides an expressive language that facilitates data integration and analysis tasks. However, the Open World Assumption (OWA) adopted by standard OWL semantics, combined with the absence of the Unique Name Assumption (UNA), makes it difficult to use OWL for data validation. What triggers constraint violations in closed world systems leads to new inferences in standard OWL systems. In this paper, we present an Integrity Constraint (IC) semantics for OWL axioms to address this issue. Ontology modelers can choose which axioms will be interpreted with IC semantics and combine open world reasoning with closed world constraint validation in a flexible way. We also show that IC validation can be reduced to query answering under certain conditions.