A reasoning framework for rule-based WSML

Abstract

WSML is an ontology language specifically tailored to annotate Web Services, and part of its semantics adheres to the rule-based knowledge representation paradigm of logic programming. We present a framework to support reasoning with rule-based WSML language variants based on existing Datalog inference engines. Therein, the WSML reasoning tasks of knowledge base satisfiability and instance retrieval are implemented through a language mapping to Datalog rules and Datalog querying. Part of the WSML semantics is realized by a fixed set of rules that form meta-level axioms. Furthermore, the framework exhibits some debugging functionality that allows for identifying violated constraints and for pointing out involved instances and problem types. Its highly modular architecture facilitates easy extensibility towards other language variants and additional features. The available implementation of the framework provides the first reasoners for the WSML language. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.