From OWL to DL-Lite through efficient ontology approximation

Ontologies provide a conceptualization of a domain of interest which can be used for different objectives, such as for providing a formal description of the domain of interest for documentation purposes, or for providing a mechanism for reasoning upon the domain. For instance, they are the core element of the Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA) [3,8] paradigm, in which the ontology is utilized as a conceptual view, allowing user access to the underlying data sources. With the aim to use an ontology as a formal description of the domain of interest, the use of expressive languages proves to be useful. If instead the goal is to use the ontology for reasoning tasks which require low computational complexity, the high expressivity of the language used to model the ontology may be a hindrance. In this scenario, the approximation of ontologies expressed in very expressive languages through ontologies expressed in languages which keep the computational complexity of the reasoning tasks low is pivotal. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.