We present a tool for modelling and reasoning with knowledge from various diverse (and possibly conflicting) viewpoints. The theoretical underpinnings are provided by enhancing base logics by standpoints according to a recently introduced formalism that we also recall. The tool works by translating the standpoint-enhanced version of the description logic SROIQ to its plain (i.e. classical) version. Existing reasoners can then be directly used to provide automated support for reasoning about diverse standpoints.

Nominal schemas extend description logics (DLs) with a restricted form of variables, thus integrating rule-like expressive power into standard DLs. They are also one of the most recently introduced DL features, and in spite of many works on algorithms and implementations, almost nothing is known about their computational complexity and expressivity. We close this gap by providing a comprehensive analysis of the reasoning complexities of a wide range of DLs--from EL to SROIQ--extended with nominal schemas. Both combinedand data complexities increase by one exponential in most cases, with the one previously known case of SROIQ being the main exception. Our proofs employ general modeling techniques that exploit the power of nominal schemas to succinctly represent many axioms, and which can also be applied to study DLs beyond those we consider.

Lehmann and Magidor's rational closure is acknowledged as a landmark in the field of non-monotonic logics and it has also been re-formulated in the context of Description Logics (DLs). We show here how to model a rational form of entailment for expressive DLs, such as SROIQ, providing a novel reasoning procedure that compiles a non-monotone DL knowledge base into a description logic program (dl-program).

We investigate a higher-order extension of the description logic (DL) SROIQ that provides a fixedly interpreted role semantically coupled with instantiation. It is useful to express interesting meta-level constraints on the modelled ontology. We provide a model-theoretic characterization of the semantics, and we show the decidability by means of reduction.

We design a decidable extension of the description logic SROIQ underlying the Web Ontology Language OWL 2. The new logic, called SR+OIQ, supports a controlled use of role axioms whose right-hand side may contain role chains or role unions. We give a tableau algorithm for checking concept satisfiability with respect to SR+OIQ ontologies and prove its soundness, completeness and termination.

In many data-centric semantic web applications, it is desirable to use OWL to encode the Integrity Constraints (IC) that must be satisfied by instance data. However, challenges arise due to the Open World Assumption (OWA) and the lack of a Unique Name Assumption (UNA) in OWL’s standard semantics. In particular, conditions that trigger constraint violations in systems using the ClosedWorld Assumption (CWA), will generate new inferences in standard OWL-based reasoning applications. In this paper, we present an alternative IC semantics for OWL that allows applications to work with the CWA and the weak UNA. Ontology modelers can choose which OWL axioms to be interpreted with our IC semantics. Thus application developers are able to combine open world reasoning with closed world constraint validation in a flexible way. We also show that IC validation can be reduced to query answering under certain conditions. Finally, we describe our prototype implementation based on the OWL reasoner Pellet.