Samuel's Tech Blog

Found a very interesting quote:

"Both OWL-DL and function-free Horn rules are decidable fragments of first-order logic with interesting, yet orthogonal expressive power"Motik B, Sattler U, Studer R. Query Answering for OWL-DL with rules. Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web. 2005;3(1):41-60. Available at: http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S157082680500003X.

"Horn rules", is what prolog builds upon (a prolog statement are horn rules, AFAIS), so maybe Prolog fits into the category of "function-free horn rules"? (Gotta try to figure that out), and OWL-DL is the W3C standard for expressive semantics, that reasoners like pellet (which is available in bioclipse build upon.

The authors of the relevant paper goes on to say:

"A combination of OWL-DL and rules is desirable for the Semantic Web; however, it might easily lead to the undecidability of interesting reasoning problems. Here, we present a decidable such combination ..."

Interesting! Could this mean that a combination of Prolog and Pellet in Bioclipse can in fact be useful? Or will the SWRL support of Pellet be the preferred way to go, for joining OWL-DL with rules? Hope to know more soon.