Generating Ontologies from Templates: A Rule-Based Approach for Capturing Regularity

We present a second-order language that can be used to succinctly specify ontologies in a consistent and transparent manner. This language is based on ontology templates (OTTR), a framework for capturing recurring patterns of axioms in ontological modelling. The language and our results are independent of any specific DL. We define the language and its semantics, including the case of negation-as-failure, investigate reasoning over ontologies specified using our language, and show results about the decidability of useful reasoning tasks about the language itself. We also state and discuss some open problems that we believe to be of interest.

Mapping Data to Ontologies with Exceptions Using Answer Set Programming

In ontology-based data access, databases are connected to an ontology via mappings from queries over the database to queries over the ontology. In this paper, we consider mappings from relational databases to first-order ontologies, and define an ASP-based framework for GLAV mappings with queries over the ontology in the mapping rule bodies. We show that this type of mappings can be used to express constraints and exceptions, as well as being a powerful mechanism for succinctly representing OBDA mappings. We give an algorithm for brave reasoning in this setting, and show that this problem has either the same data complexity as ASP (NP- complete), or it is at least as hard as the complexity of checking entailment for the ontology queries. Furthermore, we show that for ontologies with UCQ-rewritable queries there exists a natural reduction from mapping programs to \exists-ASP, an extension of ASP with existential variables that itself admits a natural reduction to ASP.