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Abstract
Ontologies are used by domain experts for knowledge representation in an unambiguous manner. After the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has recommended Web Ontology Language (OWL) for representing ontologies on the web, a large number of domain ontologies have been developed. This represented knowledge in the form of OWL can not only be used by other people but also by software applications. Although representing knowledge in a structured form like OWL is important, reasoning with OWL ontologies holds the key to many applications. Several OWL reasoners (Racer, FaCT++, Pellet, etc.) have been developed to serve the purpose. However, reasoning with some ontologies can be computational so expensive that reasoners practically becomes unusable. The thesis discusses facilitating reasoners by finding the smallest construct of an ontology that causes reasoners to be unusable.