Reasoning on Datalog± Ontologies with Abductive Logic Programming

Ontologies form the basis of the Semantic Web. Description Logics (DLs) are often the languages of choice for modeling ontologies. Integration of DLs with rules and rule-based reasoning is crucial in the so-called Semantic Web stack vision - a complete stack of recommendations and languages each based on and/or exploiting the underlying layers - which adds new features to the standards used in the Web. The growing importance of the integration between DLs and rules is proved by the definition of the profile OWL 2 RL and the definition of languages such as RIF and SWRL. Datalog± is an extension of Datalog which can be used for representing lightweight ontologies and expressing some languages of the DL-Lite family, with tractable query answering under certain language restrictions. In particular, it is able to express the DL-Lite version defined in OWL. In this work, we show that Abductive Logic Programming (ALP) can be used to represent Datalog± ontologies, supporting query answering through an abductive proof procedure, and smoothly achieving the integration of ontologies and rule-based reasoning. Often, reasoning with DLs means finding explanations for the truth of queries, that are useful when debugging ontologies and to understand answers given by the reasoning process. We show that reasoning under existential rules can be expressed by ALP languages and we present a solving system, which is experimentally proved to be competitive with DL reasoning systems. In particular, we consider an ALP framework named SCIFF derived from the IFF abductive framework. Forward and backward reasoning is naturally supported in this ALP framework. The SCIFF language smoothly supports the integration of rules, expressed in a Logic Programming language, with Datalog± ontologies, mapped into SCIFF (forward) integrity constraints. The main advantage is that this integration is achieved within a single language, grounded on abduction in computational logic, and able to model existential rules.