Affiliations: Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of
Bozen-Bolzano, Piazza Domenicani 3, Bolzano, Italy. E-mail:
debruijn@inf.unibz.it | Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI),
University of Innsbruck, Technikerstrasse 21a, Innsbruck, Austria. E-mail:
stijn.heymans@deri.org
Abstract: Many popular ontology languages are based on (subsets of)
first-order predicate logic, with classes represented by unary predicates and
properties by binary predicates. Specifically, the SemanticWeb ontology
language OWL DL is based on the Description Logic SHOIN. F-Logic is an ontology
language which is also based on first-order logic, but classes and properties
are modeled as terms rather than predicates. Our goal is to enable
interoperation between predicate-based and F-Logic-based ontology languages. To
this end, we define an intuitive translation from predicate-based ontologies to
F-Logic ontologies and show that this translation preserves entailment for
large classes of ontology languages, including most of OWL DL. Specifically, we
define the class of equality-safe (E-safe) formulas, show that the Description
Logic SHIQ is E-safe, and show that the translation preserves validity of
E-safe formulas. We use these results to close the open problem of layering
F-Logic programming on top of Description Logic Programs and we show that our
results apply to HILOG, a syntactically higher-order, but semantically
first-order language. Finally, we show that our results also apply to a
meta-modeling extension for Description Logics (v-semantics).
Keywords: frame logic, ontology translation, ontology meta-modeling, equality-safe formulas, semantic web language layering, f-logic programming
