Abstract
Instance checking is considered a central tool for data retrieval from description logic (DL) ontologies. In this paper, we propose a revised most specific concept (MSC) method for DL $\mathcal{SHI}$, which converts instance checking into subsumption problems. This revised method can generate small concepts that are specific-enough to answer a given query, and allow reasoning to explore only a subset of the ABox data to achieve efficiency. Experiments show effectiveness of our proposed method in terms of concept size reduction and the improvement in reasoning efficiency.
