A Study on the Correspondence between FCA and ELI Ontologies

The description logic EL has been used to support ontology design in various domains, and especially in biology and medecine. EL is known for its efficient reasoning and query answering capabilities. By contrast, ontology design and query answering can be supported and guided within an FCA framework. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose a formal transformation of ELI (an extension of EL with inverse roles) ontologies into an FCA framework, i.e. KELI, and we provide a formal characterization of this transformation. Then we show that SPARQL query answering over ELI ontologies can be reduced to lattice query answering over KELI concept lattices. This simplifies the query answering task and shows that some basic semantic web tasks can be improved when considered from an FCA perspective.