Web Ontologies for Cultural Heritage and their validation via a set-theory based reasoner

Claudia Cantale ^1,3, Domenico Cantone ²,

Manuela Lupica Rinato³, Marianna Nicolosi-Asmundo²,

  Daniele Francesco Santamaria²

DISUM, UNICT¹, DMI,UNICT², Officine Culturali, Catania³

Abstract

Recently, some results from computable set theory have been applied to knowledge representation and reasoning for the semantic web. Such investigative efforts are motivated by the fact that computable set theory is a research field full of interesting decidability results and that some set-theoretic fragments can be used to represent efficiently description logics and rule languages in a natural way [4].
In this talk we present a C++ reasoner [5-6] for OWL 2 ontologies including Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) rules and serialized in the OWL/XML format, that are expressed by a description logic called   [4], in short  . The reasoner is based on a variant of the  KE-tableau system for the principal TBox and ABox reasoning problems for , the latter  representable in the decidable and multi-sorted quantified set-theoretic fragment  [3] .  combines the high scalability and efficiency of SWRL with the expressivity of description logics. It supports several desirable features such as Boolean operations on concepts and roles, role constructs such as the product of concepts and role chains on the left hand side of inclusion axioms, and role properties such as transitivity, symmetry, reflexivity, and irreflexivity. The logic allows to represent several powerful ontologies for real-world problems such as the ontology for the Catania’s Benedictines Monastery  of San Nicolò l’Arena [2], an OWL 2 ontology concerning the history of the renovation of the Catania’s Benedictines Monastery by the architect Giancarlo De Carlo and its adaptation as university campus.

Therefore, the set-theoretic fragment underpinning the reasoner does not include the operator of relational composition which permits to reason with description logics that admit full existential and universal quantification. This feature that will be investigated to be included in some future extensions of the reasoner turns out to be relevant because it allows to express very powerful ontologies such as the StGallPlan ontology [1]. StGallPlan is an OWL 2 ontology representing the Saint Gall plan, one of the most ancient documents arrived intact to us, which describes the ideal model of a Benedictine monastic complex that inspired the design of many European monasteries.

 

References

[1] C. Cantale, D. Cantone, M. Lupica Rinato, M. Nicolosi-Asmundo, and D.F. Santamaria.  The Shape of a Benedictine Monastery: The SaintGall Ontology. Proceedings of the third Joint Ontology Workshops (JOWO-17), Bolzano, Italy, 21-23 September 2017. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, ISSN 1613-0073, Vol. 2050.

[2] C. Cantale, D. Cantone, M. Nicolosi-Asmundo, and D.F. Santamaria. Distant Reading Through Ontologies: The Case Study of Catania’s Benedictines Monastery. JIS.it, 8,3 (September 2017).

[3] D. Cantone and M. Nicolosi Asmundo. On the satisfiability problem for a 4-level quantified syllogistic and some applications to modal logic. Fundamenta Informaticae, 124(4):427–448, 2013.

[4] D. Cantone, M. Nicolosi-Asmundo, and D. F. Santamaria. A set-theoretic approach to ABox reasoning services. In Costantini S., Franconi E., Van Woensel W., Kontchakov R., Sadri F., Roman D. Rules and Reasoning. RuleML+RR 2017., Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 10364. Springer, 2017.

[5] D. Cantone and M. Nicolosi-Asmundo and D. F. Santamaria.  A C++ reasoner for the description logic  .Proceedings of CILC 2017, 26-29 September 2017, Naples, Italy. CEUR WS, ISSN 1613-0073, Vol. 1949, pp. 276-280.

[6] D. Cantone, M. Nicolosi-Asmundo, and D. F. Santamaria. A set-based reasoner for the description logic . Submitted.