Possible issue in the OWL 2 RL specification

Hello,

We are sending this message to the RDF-DEV community group, as the public-owl-comments@w3.org<mailto:public-owl-comments@w3.org> address has been deactivated.

Apparently the OWL 2 RL profile, as defined in https://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-profiles/ , does not consider that owl:inserseOf is symmetric. Applying the RL rules to

ex:p1 a owl:objectProperty .
ex:p2 a owl:objectProperty .
ex:p1 owl:inverseOf ex:p2 .
ex:aaa ex:p1 ex:bbb .

yields

ex:bbb ex:p2 ex:aaa .

but not

ex:p2 owl:inverseOf ex:p1 . (*)

Is this intentional or is there a rule missing :

T(?p, owl:inserseOf, ?q) => T(?q, owl:inserseOf, ?p) ?

Best regards
Hélène de Ribaupierre and Gilles Falquet

(*) We first observed this behaviour when using GraphDB with a OWL 2 RL repository.

Received on Tuesday, 19 May 2026 21:31:34 UTC