Empowering OWL with Overriding Inheritance, Conflict Resolution and Non-monotonic Reasoning

The popularity of OWL for knowledge representation in the Semantic Web applications makes it an attractive platform. Although OWL supports some form of object-oriented features for knowledge structuring and maintenance, it is significantly weak in capturing most essential object-oriented features such as single and multiple inheritance, default class values, methods, overriding and encapsulation in their true spirits. It is also weak in extending reasoning support for intelligent knowledge processing. Such features are becoming increasingly essential in applications such as social networks, e-commerce and knowledge rich ontology for Life Sciences. In this paper, we propose an extension of OWL toward a more powerful knowledge structuring language, called OWL, by supporting multiple different types of inheritance with overriding, and non-monotonic reasoning capabilities within OWL. We demonstrate OWL’s computability and implementability by presenting a translational semantics of OWL to OWL, for which we have robust execution engines while for the reasoning component of OWL we rely on Jena to support rules in OWL.