Automated Reasoning Support for First Order Ontologies

Formal ontologies play an increasingly important role in demanding knowledge representation applications like the Semantic Web. Regarding automated reasoning support, the mainstream of research focusses on ontology languages that are also Description Logics, such as OWL-DL. However, many existing ontologies go beyond Description Logics and use full first-order logic. We propose a novel transformation technique that allows to apply existing model computation systems in such situations. We describe the transformation and some variants, its properties and intended applications to ontological reasoning