Tractable approximate deduction for OWL

Today's ontology applications require efficient and reliable description logic (DL) reasoning services. Expressive DLs usually have high worst case complexity while tractable DLs are restricted in terms of expressive power. This brings a new challenge: can users use expressive DLs to build their ontologies and still enjoy the efficient services as in tractable languages? Approximation has been considered as a solution to this challenge; however, traditional approximation approaches have limitations in terms of performance and usability. In this paper, we present a tractable approximate reasoning framework for OWL 2 that improves efficiency and guarantees soundness. Evaluation on ontologies from benchmarks and real-world use cases shows that our approach can do reasoning on complex ontologies efficiently with a high recall.