Query Answering for OWL-DL with Rules

Both OWL-DL and function-free Horn rules are decidable frag-ments of first-order logic with interesting, yet orthogonal expressive power. A combination of OWL-DL and rules is desirable for the Se-mantic Web; however, it might easily lead to the undecidability of interesting reasoning problems. Here, we present a decidable such com-bination where rules are required to be DL-safe: each variable in the rule is required to occur in a non-DL-atom in the rule body. We discuss the expressive power of such a combination and present an algorithm for query answering in the related logic SHIQ extended with DL-safe rules, based on a reduction to disjunctive programs