Reasoning in SHIQ with Axiom- and Concept-Level Standpoint Modalities

Research output: Contribution to book/Conference proceedings/Anthology/ReportConference contributionContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

Standpoint logic is a recently proposed modal logic framework that is well-suited for multiperspective reasoning and ontology integration. For this reason, combinations of standpoint logic with description logics (DLs), a popular family of logic-based ontology languages, are of special interest. Prior work has shown that it is possible to add standpoints to numerous decidable fragments of first-order logics – including very expressive DLs up to SROIQbs – while preserving their reasoning complexity, so long as standpoint modalities are limited to the axiom level. A more expressive tighter modal integration, where standpoint modalities are also allowed to occur in concept expressions, has so far only been investigated for the much less expressive DL EL+. In this paper, we push this line of research showing that the DL SHIQ allows for a tight modal integration with standpoints without compromising its EXPTIME reasoning complexity. The core insight toward this result is that any satisfiable knowledge base admits a model with only polynomially many worlds, an argument which requires a rather elaborate model-theoretic construction. This allows us to establish a polynomial equisatisfiable translation into plain SHIQ which, beyond showing the theoretical result, enables us to use highly optimised OWL reasoners to provide practical reasoning support for ontology languages extended by standpoint modelling. We complement our findings with the observation that our techniques would fail upon adding the modeling feature of nominals to the underlying DL.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 21st International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning
EditorsPierre Marquis, Magdalena Ortiz, Maurice Pagnucco
PublisherIJCAI Organization
Pages383–393
Number of pages11
ISBN (electronic)978-1-956792-05-8
Publication statusPublished - 2024
Peer-reviewedYes

Publication series

SeriesProceedings of the International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning
ISSN2334-1025

External IDs

Scopus 85214695282

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas