document: Structured objects in owl : representation and reasoning Applications of semantic technologies often require the representation of and reasoning with structured objects - that is , objects composed of parts connected in complex ways . Although OWL is a general and powerful language , its class descriptions and axioms can not be used to describe arbitrarily connected structures . An OWL representation of structured objects can thus be underconstrained , which reduces the inferences that can be drawn and causes performance problems in reasoning . To address these problems , we extend OWL with description graphs , which allow for the description of structured objects in a simple and precise way . To represent conditional aspects of the domain , we also allow for SWRL-like rules over description graphs . Based on an observation about the nature of structured objects , we ensure decidability of our formalism . We also present a hypertableau-based decision procedure , which we implemented in the HermiT reasoner . To evaluate its performance , we have extracted description graphs from the GALEN and FMA ontologies , classified them successfully , and even detected a modeling error in GALEN .
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