Forgetting and uniform interpolation for ALC-ontologies with ABoxes

Abstract

We present a method to compute uniform interpolants of ALC-ontologies with ABoxes. Uniform interpolants are restricted views of ontologies that only use a specified set of symbols, but share all entailments in that signature with the original ontology. This way, it allows to select or remove information from an ontology based on a signature, which has applications in privacy, ontology analysis and ontology reuse. We show that in general, uniform interpolants of ALC-ontologies with ABoxes may require disjunctive statements or nominals in the ABox. An evaluation of the method suggests however, that in most practical cases uniform interpolants can be represented as a classical ALC-ontology.