Increasing the Expressiveness of OWL Through Procedural Attachments

The purpose of this paper is to provide an introduction to the OWL Web ontology language, a survey focused on the current state of the art in OWL inferencing capabilities, and a historical perspective on procedural attachments. The perspective is aligned with current OWL research. Several limitations of the OWL language and proposed extensions to overcome these limitations are discussed. A framework that provides empirical testing support for evaluating the effects of procedural attachments to the OWL inferencing capabilities is outlined. The examples presented suggest that it is possible to provide rule-based extensibility support for OWL that does not limit the ability of an OWL reasoner to perform consistency checking. Specifically, the framework is used to demonstrate with an example experiment the ability to provide support for the compound sub-property axiom.