Abstract
Identity is one of the main principles in ontology engineering. Mechanisms to identify objects by using attribute values or by their participation to relationships with other objects are present in most conceptual modeling formalisms used in software engineering and database or information system design. Identification mechanisms have also been investigated in expressive Description Logics. However they are currently missing in OWL. In this paper we argue for their usefulness, and we show how to extend DL-LiteA, a tractable fragment of OWL, with identification assertions without losing tractability of reasoning.