Reasoning over Ontologies with DLV

Abstract

The paper presents DLV, an advanced AI system from the area of Answer Set Programming (ASP), showing its high potential for reasoning over ontologies. Ontological reasoning services represent fundamental features in the development of the Semantic Web. Among them, scientists are focusing their attention on the so-called ontology-based query answering (OBQA) task where a (conjunctive) query has to be evaluated over a logical theory (a.k.a. Knowledge Base, or simply KB) consisting of an extensional database (a.k.a. ABox) paired with an ontology (a.k.a. TBox). From a theoretical viewpoint, much has been done. Indeed, Description logics and Datalog have been recognized as the two main families of formal ontology specification languages to specify KBs, while OWL has been identified as the official W3C standard language to physically represent and share them; moreover sophisticated algorithms and techniques have been proposed. Conversely, from a practical point of view, only a few systems for solving complex ontological reasoning services such as OBQA have been developed, and no official standard has been identified yet. The aim of the present paper is to illustrate the applicability of the well-known ASP system DLV for powerful ontology-based reasoning.