Expressive Tractable Description Logics based on SROIQ Rules

We introduce description logic (DL) rules as a new rule-based formalism for knowledge representation in DLs. As a fragment of the Semantic Web Rule Language SWRL, DL rules allow for a tight integration with DL knowledge bases. In contrast to SWRL, however, the combination of DL rules with expressive description logics remains decidable, and we show that the DL SROIQ – the basis for the ongoing standardisation of OWL 2 – can completely internalise DL rules. On the other hand, DL rules capture many expressive features of SROIQ that are not available in simpler DLs yet. While reasoning in SROIQ is highly intractable, it turns out that DL rules can be introduced to various lightweight DLs without increasing their worst-case complexity. In particular, DL rules enable us to significantly extend the tractable DLs EL++ and DLP.