Description Logics
Description logics are languages tailored for expressing knowledge
about concepts and concept hierarchies. They are usually given a
Tarski style declarative semantics, which allows them to be seen as
sub-languages of predicate logic. One starts with primitive concepts
and roles, and can use the language constructs (such as intersection,
union, role quantification, etc.) to define new concepts and
roles. Concepts can be considered as unary predicates which are
interpreted as sets of individuals whereas roles are binary predicates
which are interpreted as binary relations between individuals. The
main reasoning tasks are classification and subsumption
checking. Subsumption represents the is-a relation. A whole family of
knowledge representation systems have been built using these languages
and for most of them complexity results for the subsumption algorithm
are known. Description logic systems have been used for building a
variety of applications including software management systems,
planning systems, configuration systems, and natural language
understanding.
My interests in description logics are particularly related related to
adding defaults to description logics, adding facilities for reasoning
with part-of and composite objects to description logics, and using
description logics in applications, in conjunction with other systems.
My publications related to description logics
The The Description Logics Homepage
Description Logic Workshop in 1998 and before
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