Towards Ontology-Mediated Planning with OWL DL Ontologies (Extended Version)
This work addresses the challenge of combining open-world ontology reasoning with closed-world planning for researchers in AI planning and ontology engineering, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing integration methods.
The authors tackled the problem of integrating OWL DL ontologies into planning by proposing a new approach that keeps planning specifications and ontologies separate, linked via an interface, and rewrites the problem into classical planning with data-dependent rewritings. The result is a method that supports the full OWL DL fragment and is optimized for small domains, with an initial experimental evaluation demonstrating its potential and limitations.
While classical planning languages make the closed-domain and closed-world assumption, there have been various approaches to extend those with DL reasoning, which is then interpreted under the usual open-world semantics. Current approaches for planning with DL ontologies integrate the DL directly into the planning language, and practical approaches have been developed based on first-order rewritings or rewritings into datalog. We present here a new approach in which the planning specification and ontology are kept separate, and are linked together using an interface. This allows planning experts to work in a familiar formalism, while existing ontologies can be easily integrated and extended by ontology experts. Our approach for planning with those ontology-mediated planning problems is optimized for cases with comparatively small domains, and supports the whole OWL DL fragment. The idea is to rewrite the ontology-mediated planning problem into a classical planning problem to be processed by existing planning tools. Different to other approaches, our rewriting is data-dependent. A first experimental evaluation of our approach shows the potential and limitations of this approach.