Integrity Constraints in OWL

Abstract

In many data-centric applications, it is desirable to use OWL as an expressive schema language with which one expresses constraints that must be satisfied by instance data. However, specific aspects of OWL's standard semantics -- i.e., the Open World Assumption (OWA) and the absence of Unique Name Assumption (UNA) -- make it difficult to use OWL in this way. In this paper, we present an Integrity Constraint (IC) semantics for OWL axioms, show that IC validation can be reduced to query answering, and present our preliminary results with a prototype implementation using Pellet.