Computing Role-depth Bounded Generalizations in the Description Logic ELOR

Description Logics (DLs) are a family of knowledge representation formalisms, that provides the theoretical basis for the standard web ontology language OWL. Generalization services like the least common subsumer (lcs) and the most specific concept (msc) are the basis of several ontology design methods, and form the core of similarity measures. For the DL ELOR, which covers most of the OWL 2 EL profile, the lcs and msc need not exist in general, but they always exist if restricted to a given role-depth. We present algorithms that compute these role-depth bounded generalizations. Our method is easy to implement, as it is based on the polynomial-time completion algorithm for ELOR.