Any-World Access to OWL from Prolog

The W3C standard OWL provides a decidable language for representing ontologies. While its use is rapidly spreading, efforts are being made by researchers worldwide to augment OWL with additional expressive features or by interlacing it with other forms of knowledge representation, in order to make it applicable for even further purposes. In this paper, we integrate OWL with one of the most successful and most widely used forms of knowledge representation, namely Prolog, and present a hybrid approach which layers Prolog on top of OWL in such a way that the open-world semantics of OWL becomes directly accessible within the Prolog system.