Implementing and Evaluating a Rule-Based Approach to Querying Regular EL+ Ontologies

Recent years have witnessed the wide recognition of the importance of ontology and rule in the AI research. In this paper, we report our implementation and evaluation of a rule-based approach to querying regular EL+, a restriction of a well known description logics based ontology language EL+, by only allowing regular role axioms. It is known that, without such a restriction, query answering in EL+ in general is undividable. In our approach, a regular EL+ ontology is first translated into a logic program which contains a set of rules, and then by forward chaining reasoning the pseudo model of the above logic program is calculated. Query answering for EL+ is rewritten to instance checking in the pseudo model of a logic program. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of implementation and evaluation for regular EL+ ontologism.