Distributed reasoning with ontologies and rules in order-sorted logic programming

Abstract

Integrating ontologies and rules on the Semantic Web enables software agents to interoperate between them; however, this leads to two problems. First, reasoning services in SWRL (a combination of OWL and RuleML) are not decidable. Second, no studies have focused on distributed reasoning services for integrating ontologies and rules in multiple knowledge bases. In order to address these problems, we consider distributed reasoning services for ontologies and rules with decidable and effective computation. In this paper, we describe multiple order-sorted logic programming that transfers rigid properties from knowledge bases. Our order-sorted logic contains types (rigid sorts), non-rigid sorts, and unary predicates that distinctly express essential sorts, non-essential sorts, and non-sortal properties. We formalize the order-sorted Horn-clause calculus for such properties in a single knowledge base. This calculus is extended by embedding rigid-property derivation for multiple knowledge bases, each of which can transfer rigid-property information from other knowledge bases. In order to enable the reasoning to be effective and decidable, we design a query-answering system that combines order-sorted linear resolution and rigid-property resolution as top-down algorithms.