Forgetting concept and role symbols in ALCH-ontologies

Abstract

We develop a resolution-based method for forgetting concept and role symbols in ALCH ontologies, or for computing uniform interpolants in ALCH . Uniform interpolants use only a restricted set of symbols, while preserving logical consequences of the original ontology involving these symbols. While recent work towards practical methods for uniform interpolation in expressive description logics limits attention to forgetting concept symbols, we believe most applications would benefit from the possibility to forget both role and concept symbols. We focus on the description logic ALCH, which allows for the formalisation of role hierarchies. Our approach is based on a recently developed resolution-based calculus for forgetting concept symbols in ALC ontologies, which we extend by redundancy elimination techniques to make it practical for larger ontologies. Experiments on ALCH fragments of real life ontologies suggest that our method is applicable in a lot of real-life applications. © Springer-Verlag 2013.