OWL-Based Knowledge Discovery Using Description Logics Reasoners

The recent advent of the Semantic Web has given rise to the need for efficient and sound methods that would provide reasoning support over the knowledge scattered on the Internet. Description Logics and DLbased inference engines in particular play a significant role towards this goal, as they seem to have overlapping expressivity with the Semantic Web de facto language, OWL. In this paper we argue that DLs currently constitute one of the most tempting available formalisms to support reasoning with OWL. Further, we present and survey a number of DL based systems that could be used for this task. Around one of them (Racer) we build our Knowledge Discovery Interface, a web application that can be used to pose intelligent queries to Semantic Web documents in an intuitive manner. As a proof of concept, we then apply the KDI on the CIDOC-CRM reference ontology and discuss our results.