A better uncle for OWL

Abstract

We propose a description-logic style extension of OWL 2 with nominal schemas which can be used like variable nominal classes within axioms. This feature allows ontology languages to express arbitrary DL-safe rules (as expressible in SWRL or RIF) in their native syntax. We show that adding nominal schemas to OWL 2 does not increase the worst-case reasoning complexity, and we identify a novel tractable language SROELV3(∩, x) that is versatile enough to capture the lightweight languages OWL EL and OWL RL.