Terminological Reasoning in SHIQ with Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams

We present a new algorithm for reasoning in the description logic SHIQ, which is the most prominent fragment of the Web Ontology Language OWL. The algorithm is based on ordered binary decision diagrams (OBDDs) as a data structure for storing and operating on large model representations. We thus draw on the success and the proven scalability of OBDD-based systems. To the best of our knowledge, we present the very first algorithm for using OBDDs for reasoning with general Tboxes