On Reducing Reasoning and Querying in Natural Logic to Database Querying

This paper outlines a systems architecture for deductive querying of knowledge bases in a natural logic. The natural logic may be conceived as an extension of formal ontology languages featuring multiple quantified relationships between classes in addition to the subclass relation. It is proposed to obtain deductive querying by computation and storing of relevant logical consequences in a preliminary step. The paper explains how then subsequently query answers within the natural logic can be computed through plain relational database querying using ordinary query languages.