Qualitative Reasoning and the Web Ontology Language

The desire to share and reuse knowledge has led to the establishment of a new knowledge representation language: the Web Ontology Language (OWL). The design choices made in OWL are properly documented, but their implications for AI research are not yet clear. This thesis explores the expressiveness of OWL by formalising the vocabulary and models used in qualitative reasoning (QR), and the applicability of OWL reasoners to solve QR problems. In addition, a parser has been developed to export the QR knowledge representation to an OWL representation. To formalise the OWL definitions of the QR vocabulary and models existing OWL patterns were used as much as possible. However, some new patterns had to be developed in order to cope with the QR vocabulary and models. Furthermore, some conceptual patterns which are impossible to define in OWL are revealed.