Recent advances in integrating OWL and rules (technical communication)

As part of the quest for a unifying logic for the SemanticWeb Technology Stack,1 a central issue is finding suitable ways of integrating description logics based on theWeb Ontology Language (OWL) with rulebased approaches based on logic programming. Such integration is difficult since naive approaches typically result in the violation of one ormore desirable design principles. For example, while both OWL 2 DL and RIF Core (a dialect of the Rule Interchange Format RIF) are decidable, their naive union is not, unless carefully chosen syntactic restrictions are applied. We report on recent advances and ongoing work by the authors in integrating OWL and rules. We take an OWL-centric perspective, which means that we take OWL 2 DL as a starting point and pursue the question of how features of rule-based formalisms can be added without jeopardizing decidability. We also report on incorporating the closed world assumption and on reasoning algorithms. This paper essentially serves as an entry point to the original papers, to which we will refer throughout, where detailed expositions of the results can be found.