OntoDLV: An ASP-based System for Enterprise Ontologies

Abstract

Enterprise/Corporate ontologies are widely adopted to conceptualize business enterprise information. In this area, the semantic peculiarities of Answer Set Programming (ASP), like the Closed World Assumption (CWA) and the Unique Name Assumption (UNA), are more appropriate than the Ontology Web Language (OWL) assumptions, also because such ontologies frequently stem from relational databases, where both CWA and UNA are adopted. This article presents OntoDLV, a system based on ASP for the specification and reasoning on enterprise ontologies. OntoDLV implements a powerful ontology representation language, called OntoDLP, extending (disjunctive) ASP with all the main ontology features including classes, inheritance, relations and axioms. OntoDLP is strongly typed, and includes also complex type constructors, like lists and sets. Importantly, OntoDLV supports a powerful interoperability mechanism with OWL, allowing the user to retrieve information from OWL ontologies, and build rule-based reasoning on top of OWL ontologies. The system is already used in a number of real-world applications including agent-based systems, information extraction, and text classification.