A query tool for EL with non-monotonic rules

Abstract

We present the Protégé plug-in NoHR that allows the user to take an EL⊥+ ontology, add a set of non-monotonic (logic programming) rules - suitable e.g. to express defaults and exceptions - and query the combined knowledge base. Our approach uses the well-founded semantics for MKNF knowledge bases as underlying formalism, so no restriction other than DL-safety is imposed on the rules that can be written. The tool itself builds on the procedure SLG(O) and, with the help of OWL 2 EL reasoner ELK, pre-processes the ontology into rules, whose result together with the non-monotonic rules serve as input for the top-down querying engine XSB Prolog. With the resulting plug-in, even queries to very large ontologies, such as SNOMED CT, augmented with a large number of rules, can be processed at an interactive response time after one initial brief pre-processing period. At the same time, our system is able to deal with possible inconsistencies between the rules and an ontology that alone is consistent. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.