A practical approach for scalable conjunctive query answering on acyclic εℒ+ knowledge base

Abstract

Conjunctive query answering for εℒ++ ontologies has recently drawn much attention, as the Description Logic εℒ ++ captures the expressivity of many large ontologies in the biomedical domain and is the foundation for the OWL 2 EL profile. In this paper, we propose a practical approach for conjunctive query answering in a fragment of εℒ++, namely acyclic εℒ+, that supports role inclusions. This approach can be implemented with low cost by leveraging any existing relational database management system to do the ABox data completion and query answering. We conducted a preliminary experiment to evaluate our approach using a large clinical data set and show our approach is practical. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.