Optimised Absorption for Expressive Description Logics

ABSTRACT. Absorption is a well-known and very important optimisation technique that is widely used to reduce non-determinism for tableau-based reasoning systems. In this paper, we present the partial absorption algorithm which allows for absorbing parts of concepts of very expressive Description Logics and, thus, further reduces non-determinism. In addition, we present several extensions of the basic algorithm, which, for example, can be used to improve the handling of datatypes. The described absorption techniques are used in the reasoning system Konclude and they are essential for Konclude's performance.