The Semantic Web effort has steadily been gaining traction in the recent
years. In particular,Web search companies are recently realizing that their
products need to evolve towards having richer semantic search capabilities.
Description logics (DLs) have been adopted as the formal underpinnings for
Semantic Web languages used in describing ontologies. Reasoning under
uncertainty has recently taken a leading role in this arena, given the nature
of data found on theWeb. In this paper, we present a probabilistic extension of
the DL EL++ (which underlies the OWL2 EL profile) using Markov logic networks
(MLNs) as probabilistic semantics. This extension is tightly coupled, meaning
that probabilistic annotations in formulas can refer to objects in the
ontology. We show that, even though the tightly coupled nature of our language
means that many basic operations are data-intractable, we can leverage a
sublanguage of MLNs that allows to rank the atomic consequences of an ontology
relative to their probability values (called ranking queries) even when these
values are not fully computed. We present an anytime algorithm to answer
ranking queries, and provide an upper bound on the error that it incurs, as
well as a criterion to decide when results are guaranteed to be correct.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Conference on Uncertainty
in Artificial Intelligence (UAI2012