Forgetting and Uniform Interpolation for ALC-Ontologies with ABoxes

ABSTRACT. We present a method to compute uniform interpolants of ALC ontologies with ABoxes. Uniform interpolants are restricted views of ontologies that only use a specified set of symbols, but share all entailments in that signature with the original ontology. This way, it allows to select or remove information from an ontology based on a signature, which has applications in privacy, ontology analysis and ontology reuse. In turns out, that in general, uniform interpolants of ALC ontologies with ABoxes may require the use of disjunctions in the ABox or nominals. Our evaluation of the method suggests however, that in most practical cases uniform interpolants can be represented as a classical ALC ontology.