On logical consequence for collections of OWL documente

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the (in)dependence among OWL documents with respect to the logical consequence when they are combined, in particular the inference of concept and role assertions about individuals. On the one hand, we present a systematic approach to identifying those documents that affect the inference of a given fact. On the other hand, we consider ways for fast detection of independence. First, we demonstrate several special cases in which two documents are independent of each other. Secondly, we introduce an algorithm for checking the independence in the general case. In addition, we describe two applications in which the above results have allowed us to develop novel approaches to overcome some difficulties in reasoning with large scale OWL data. Both applications demonstrate the usefulness of this work for improving the scalability of a practical Semantic Web system that relies on the reasoning about individuals. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.