Goal-Directed Tracing of Inferences in EL Ontologies.
Yevgeny Kazakov, Pavel Klinov · 2014
Abstract. EL is a family of tractable Description Logics (DLs) that is the basis of the OWL 2 EL profile. Unlike for many expressive DLs, reasoning in EL can be performed by computing a deductively-closed set of logical consequences of some specific form. In some ontology-based applications, e.g., for ontology de-bugging, knowing the logical consequences of the ontology axioms is often not sufficient. The user also needs to know from which axioms and how the conse-quences were derived. Although it is possible to keep track of all inferences ap-plied during reasoning, this is usually not done in practice to avoid the overheads. In this paper, we present a goal-directed method that can generate inferences for selected consequences in the deductive closure without re-applying all rules from scratch. We provide an empirical evaluation demonstrating that the method is fast and economical for large EL ontologies. Although the main benefits are demon-strated for EL reasoning, the method can be easily extended to other procedures based on deductive closure computation using fixed sets of rules. 1