Local closed world semantics: Keep it simple, stupid!

A combination of open and closed-world reasoning (usually called local closed world reasoning) is a desirable capability of knowledge representation formalisms for Semantic Web applications. However, none of the proposals made to date for extending description logics with local closed world capabilities has had any significant impact on applications. We believe that one of the key reasons for this is that current proposals fail to provide approaches which are intuitively accessible for application developers and at the same time are applicable, as extensions, to expressive description logics such as SROIQ, which underlies the Web Ontology Language OWL. In this paper we propose a new approach which overcomes key limitations of other major proposals made to date. It is based on an adaptation of circumscriptive description logics which, in contrast to previously reported circumscription proposals, is applicable to SROIQ without rendering reasoning over the resulting language undecidable.