Inference Fusion: A Hybrid Approach to Taxonomic Reasoning

We present a hybrid way to extend taxonomic reasoning using inference fusion, i.e. the dynamic combination of inferences from distributed heterogeneous reasoners. Our approach integrates results from a DL-based taxonomic reasoner with results from a constraint solver. Inference fusion is carried out by (i) parsing heterogeneous input knowledge, producing suitable homogeneous subset of the input knowledge for each specialised reasoner; (ii) processing the homogeneous knowledge, collecting the reasoning results and passing them to the other reasoner if appropriate; (iii) combining the results of the two reasoners. We discuss the benefits of our approach to the ontological reasoning and demonstrate our ideas by proposing a hybrid modelling languages, DL(D)=S, and illustrating its use by means of examples.