On the properties of metamodeling in OWL

Abstract

A common practice in conceptual modeling is to separate the intensional from the extensional model. Although very intuitive, this approach is inadequate for many complex domains, where the borderline between the two models is not clear-cut. Therefore, OWL-Full, the most expressive of the Semantic Web ontology languages, allows combining the intensional and the extensional model by a feature we refer to as metamodeling. In this paper, we show that the semantics of metamodeling adopted in OWL-Full leads to undecidability of basic inference problems, due to free mixing of logical and metalogical symbols. Based on this result, we propose two alternative semantics for metamodeling: the contextual and the HiLog semantics. We show that SHOIQ - a description logic underlying OWL-DL - extended with metamodeling under either semantics is decidable. Finally, we show how the latter semantics can be used in practice to axiomatize the logical interaction between concepts and metaconcepts. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.