A meta-logical approach for reasoning with semantic web ontologies

Abstract

The design of Semantic Web markup languages, such as RDF, RDFS, and OWL, has been influenced by many different concepts, such as semantic structures and frame representations, object-oriented approaches, Description Logic, and first-order logic. Currently a Semantic Web ontology represented in these different languages is processed and manipulated differently by various approaches; however, in this paper we propose a single framework using meta-logic which can process the ontology in a uniform manner. Meta-logic allows us to reason with statements about description of classes, properties, instances, and their relationships expressed in RDF, RDFS, and OWL. This is accomplished by: initially an ontology, represented in combined RDF, RDFS, and OWL languages, is transformed to meta-logical statements representing definitions of classes and properties, relationships between classes and properties, and relationships between instances, etc.; later these statements are reasoned by a meta-interpreter which provides a query answering mechanism to infer meta and context information from the Semantic Web ontology. or a conceptual graph (3). An object-oriented approach also has an influence on the design of OIL (4), a part of DAML+OIL language from which OWL was derived. In addition, both DAML+OIL and OWL are developed based on Description Logic, a subset of first-order logic. Especially OWL DL, a sub-language of OWL, is designed to support Description Logic. Due to the fact that several different concepts had influences on the design of these languages, this lead to the development of several different approaches for processing and manipulating SW ontologies. In this paper we shall consider some of those approaches that are based on logic programming and object-orientation before we characterize our meta-logical approach. Some approaches based on logic programming transformed an SW ontology into a logic program in order to process and