In the field of knowledge management and computer science, ontologies provide a structured framework for modeling domain-specific knowledge by defining concepts and their relationships. However, the lack of tools that provide effective visualization is still a significant challenge. While numerous ontology editors and viewers exist, most of them fail to graphically represent ontology structures in a meaningful and non-overwhelming way, limiting users' ability to comprehend dependencies and properties within large ontological frameworks. In this paper, we present OntView, an ontology viewer that is designed to provide users with an intuitive visual representation of ontology concepts and their formal definitions through a user-friendly interface. Building on the use of a DL reasoner, OntView follows a "What you see is what you meant" paradigm, showing the actual inferred knowledge. One key aspect for this is its ability to visualize General Concept Inclusions (GCI), a feature absent in existing visualization tools. Moreover, to avoid a possible information overload, Ontview also offers different ways to show a simplified view of the ontology by: 1) creating ontology summaries by assessing the importance of the concepts (according to different available algorithms), 2) focusing the visualization on the existing TBox elements between two given classes and 3) allowing to hide/show different branches in a dynamic way without losing the semantics. OntView has been released with an open-source license for the whole community.

Answering conjunctive queries (CQs) over a set of facts extended with existential rules is a key problem in knowledge representation and databases. This problem can be solved using the chase (aka materialisation) algorithm; however, CQ answering is undecidable for general existential rules, so the chase is not guaranteed to terminate. Several acyclicity conditions provide sufficient conditions for chase termination. In this paper, we present two novel such conditions--model-faithful acyclicity (MFA) and model-summarising acyclicity (MSA)--that generalise many of the acyclicity conditions known so far in the literature. Materialisation provides the basis for several widely-used OWL 2 DL reasoners.

The last years have seen an exponential increase in the interest for the development of methods for combining probability with Description Logics (DLs). These methods are very useful to model real world domains, where incompleteness and uncertainty are common. This combination has become a fundamental component of the Semantic Web.Our work started with the development of a probabilistic semantics for DL, called DISPONTE, that applies the distribution semantics to DLs. Under DISPONTE we annotate axioms of a theory with a probability, that can be interpreted as the degree of our belief in the corresponding axiom, and we assume that each axiom is independent of the others. Several algorithms have been proposed for supporting the development of the Semantic Web. Efficient DL reasoners, such us Pellet, are able to extract implicit information from the modeled ontologies. Despite the availability of many DL reasoners, the number of probabilistic reasoners is quite small. We developed BUNDLE, a reasoner based on Pellet that allows to compute the probability of queries.

Web Ontology Language (OWL) reasoners are used to infer new logical relations from ontologies. While inferring new facts, these reasoners can be further optimized, e.g., by properly ordering disjuncts in disjunction expressions of ontologies for satisfiability testing of concepts. Different expansion-ordering heuristics have been developed for this purpose. The built-in heuristics in these reasoners determine the order for branches in search trees while each heuristic choice causes different effects for various ontologies depending on the ontologies' syntactic structure and probably other features as well. A learning-based approach that takes into account the features aims to select an appropriate expansion-ordering heuristic for each ontology. The proper choice is expected to accelerate the reasoning process for the reasoners. In this paper, the effect of our methodology is investigated on a well-known reasoner that is JFact. Our experiments show the average speedup by a factor of one to two orders of magnitude for satisfiability testing after applying learning methodology for selecting the right expansion-ordering heuristics.

For expressive ontology languages such as OWL 2 DL, classification is a computationally expensive task—2NEXPTIME-complete in the worst case. Hence, it is highly desirable to be able to accurately estimate classification time, especially for large and complex ontologies. Recently, machine learning techniques have been successfully applied to predicting the reasoning hardness category for a given (ontology, reasoner) pair. In this paper, we further develop predictive models to estimate actual classification time using regression techniques, with ontology metrics as features. Our large-scale experiments on 6 state-of-the-art OWL 2 DL reasoners and more than 450 significantly diverse ontologies demonstrate that the prediction models achieve high accuracy, good generalizability and statistical significance. Such prediction models have a wide range of applications. We demonstrate how they can be used to efficiently and accurately identify performance hotspots in a large and complex ontology, an otherwise very time-consuming and resource-intensive task.