Ph.D. Dissertation Defense “EFFICIENT ALGORITHMS FOR FRAGMENTS OF HORN DESCRIPTION LOGICS” by David Carral

Ph.D. Committee:  Drs. Pascal Hitzler, Advisor, TK Prasad, Michael Raymer, and Bernardo Cuenca Grau (University of Oxford) 

Abstract

We characterize two fragments of Horn Description Logics and we define two specialized reasoning algorithms that effectively solve the standard reasoning tasks over each of such fragments. We believe our work to be of general interest since (1) a rather large proportion of real-world Horn ontologies belong to some of these two fragments and (2) the implementations based on our reasoning approach significantly outperform state-of-the-art reasoners. Claims (1) and (2) are extensively proven via empirically evaluation.