Abstract
This paper presents a practical method for computing solutions of concept forgetting in the description logic ALCOQ(¬, u, t), basic ALC extended with nominals, qualified number restrictions, role negation, role conjunction and role disjunction. The method is based on a non-trivial generalisation of Ackermann’s Lemma, and attempts to compute either semantic solutions of concept forgetting or uniform interpolants in ALCOQ(¬, u, t). It is so far the only approach to concept forgetting in description logics with number restrictions plus nominals, as well as in description logics with ABoxes. Results of an evaluation with a prototypical implementation have shown that the method was successful in more than 90% of the test cases from a large corpus of biomedical ontologies. In only 13.2% of these cases the solutions were semantic solutions.