Converting instance checking to subsumption: A rethink for object queries over practical ontologies

Abstract

Instance checking is considered a central service for data retrieval from description logic (DL) ontologies. In this paper, we propose a revised most specific concept (MSC) method for DL SHI, which converts instance checking into subsumption problems. This revised method can generate small concepts that are specific-enough to answer a given query, and allow reasoning to explore only a subset of the ABox data to achieve efficiency. Experiments show effectiveness of our proposed method in terms of concept size reduction and the improvement in reasoning efficiency.