Abstract

Description Logics (DLs) is a family of very expressive logics. But some forms of knowledge are much more intuitive to formulate otherwise, say, as rules. Rules in DLs can be dealt with by two approaches: (i) use rules as they are even though it leads to undecidability. (ii) or make the rules DL-safe, which will restrict their semantic impact and, e.g., loose the nice "car owners are engine owners" inference. Here, we offer a third possibility: we rewrite the rule, if it satisfies certain restrictions, inherited from [Special characters omitted.] , into a set of axioms which preserves the nice inferences. This rewriting also has the benefit of being compatible with existing tools and standards, and to make the most of this, software supporting this approach is provided. In this thesis, we describe the rewriting technique and prove that it does really preserve the semantics of the rules and also present the software we developed to support the adoption of the proposed technique