Reasoning Services for an OWL Authoring Tool: An Experience Report .
Thorsten Liebig, Holger Pfeifer, Friedrich W. von Henke · Description Logics · 2004
OWL has been designed to be a formal language for representing ontologies in the Semantic Web. In short, OWL is the result of combining an expressive Description Logic (DL) with techniques and standards of the Web. DLs have been well studied in the field of knowledge representation over the last decades. As one result, some highly optimized DL reasoners have been implemented, which provide an excellent starting point for building a sound and complete OWL DL/Lite reasoner. However, having a traditional DL system with standard functionality is not enough in the current context. So far, DL systems have been used by KR experts mainly in isolated application domains. Now, in order to make the Semantic Web happen far more flexible and interactive DL-based tools are needed for building, maintaining, linking, and applying ontologies even for non-experienced users. The importance of so-called non-standard inference services that support building and maintaining knowledge bases has been pointed out recently [1, 2]. We argue that the availability of those inference services is a fundamental premise for upcoming real-world Semantic Web systems and applications. Our experience in the course of developing the graphical ontology editor OntoTrack is a prime example here.