Reasoning with WSML

In this chapter we will mainly focus on specific component in the conceptual model of WSML, namely ontologies. We discuss ontology reasoning and our enabling technologies in detail. Ontology reasoning is especially interesting because of its fundamental role in the WSML architecture: any other conceptual element makes use of ontologies to capture relevant (static) background knowledge. Reasoning with the respective descriptions therefore requires always support for ontology reasoning. Reasoning with formal description of the other conceptual elements (e.g., functional description of Web services) can sometimes even be completely reduced to ontology reasoning (See Chapter 6 and [82, 83, 12]).

The chapter is structured as follows: we discuss ontology reasoning in Section 8.1. We describe a generic framework enabling ontology reasoning in WSML in Section 8.2. The generic framework is then instantiated and considered in detail for the main ontology languages in WSML which are of practical interest, namely for rule-based WSML in Section 8.3 and for DLbased WSML in Section 8.4.