Computational Models of Argument
S. Modgil et al. (Eds.)© 2018 The authors and IOS Press.
This article is published online with Open Access by IOS Press and distributed under the termsof the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0).
doi:10.3233/978-1-61499-906-5-455

455

AIF-EL – An OWL2-EL-Compliant AIF
Ontology
Federico CERUTTI a , Alice TONIOLO b , Timothy J. NORMAN c ,Floris BEX d , Iyad RAHWAN e and Chris REED faCardiﬀ University, UKb
University of St. Andrews, UKc
University of Southampton, UKdUniversity of Utrecht, NLeMIT, USAf
University of Dundee, UKAbstract. This paper brieﬂy describes AIF-EL, an OWL2-EL compliant
ontology for the Argument Interchange Format.
Keywords. argumentation, AIF, OWL2

1. The Argument Interchange Format and its Current OWL Version
The Argument Interchange Format (AIF) [1,4,3] is the current proposal for astandard notation for argument structures. It is based on a graph that speciﬁes
two types of nodes: information nodes (or I-nodes) and scheme nodes (or S-nodes).
These are represented by two disjoint sets, NI ∪ NS = N and NI ∩ NS = ∅,where information nodes represent claims, premises, data, etc., and scheme nodes
capture the application of patterns of reasoning belonging to a set S = S R ∪ S C ∪S P , S R ∩ S C = S C ∩ S P = S P ∩ S R = ∅. Reasoning patterns can be of threetypes: rule of inference S R ; criteria of preference S P ; and criteria of conﬂicts S C .
The relation fulﬁls ⊆ NS × S expresses that a scheme node instantiates aparticular scheme. Scheme nodes, moreover, can be one of three types: rule ofinference application nodes NSRA ; preference application nodes NSP A ; or conﬂict
application nodes NSCA , with S = NSRA ∪ NSP A ∪ NSCA , and NSRA ∩ NSP A =NSP A ∩ NSCA = NSCA ∩ NSRA = ∅.
Nodes are connected by edges whose semantics is implicitly deﬁned by theiruse. For instance, an information node connected to a RA scheme node, with thearrow terminating in the latter, would suggest that the information node serves
as a premise for the inference rule.
In 2012 an OWL version of the AIF was released1 and, to date, it is the
only version available. However, the OWL proﬁle checker2 reports 4 errors due
1 http://www.arg.dundee.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/AIF.owl (on 13 Apr 2018)
2 https://github.com/stain/profilechecker (on 13 Apr 2018)

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to illegal redeclaration of entities, where the same URI is used both for a DataProperty and an Annotation Property [2]. In addition, when checked against theOWL2 proﬁles, it returns 277 violations for OWL2 EL proﬁle.

2. AIF-EL
AIF-EL3 is a fully OWL2-EL [5] compliant version derived from the previous AIF
OWL version. The OWL 2 EL proﬁle is designed as a subset of OWL 2 that isparticularly suitable for applications employing ontologies that deﬁne very large
numbers of classes and/or properties; captures the expressive power used by manysuch ontologies; and for which ontology consistency, class expression subsumption, and instance checking can be decided in polynomial time. In addition, somecommercial triple stores systems come equipped with an OWL2-EL reasoner.
In this version we solved the issues behind all the violations mentioned above:
redeﬁnitions between annotation properties and data properties have been uniﬁed
into data properties to enable reasoners to properly handle them; cardinality
requirements on object properties have been removed, as they raise the complexityof reasoning activities; removal of universal quantiﬁcation in deﬁning classes, butadding such pieces of information to the deﬁnition of the range of the object
properties, notably haxException_desc and hasPresumption_desc.
Moreover, there has been the need to remove all the disjunctions used in thedeﬁnition of the various classes. The notable examples are Scheme_Application
or Statement that becomes Node; NegativeConsequences_Inference orPositiveConsequences_Inference or PracticalReasoning_Inference that
becomes Consequential_Inferrence; and ExpertOpinion_Inference orPositionToKnow_Inference that require the deﬁnition of a new superclass,namely Testimony_Inference.

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3 https://osf.io/rhjcb/download (on 13 Apr 2018). Released under CC-BYv4. Demonstration available at http://www.visualdataweb.de/webvowl/#iri=https://osf.io/rhjcb/download (on 28 Jun 2018).