The revival of structural subsumption in tableau-based description logic reasoners

The paper summarizes our experiences with optimization techniques for well-known tableau-based description logic reasoning systems, and analyzes the performance of very simple techniques to cope with Tboxes whose bulk axioms just use a less expressive language such as ELH, whereas some small parts of the Tbox use a language as expressive as SHIQ. The techniques analyzed in this paper have been tested with RacerPro, but they can be embedded into other tableau-based reasoners such as, e.g., Fact++ or Pellet in a seamless way.