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Small is Again Beautiful in Description Logics

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Abstract

The Description Logic (DL) research of the last 20 years was mainly concerned with increasing the expressive power of the employed description language without losing the ability of implementing highly-optimized reasoning systems that behave well in practice, in spite of the ever increasing worst-case complexity of the underlying inference problems. OWL DL, the standard ontology language for the Semantic Web, is based on such an expressive DL for which reasoning is highly intractable. Its sublanguage OWL Lite was intended to provide a tractable version of OWL, but turned out to be only of a slightly lower worst-case complexity than OWL DL. This and other reasons have led to the development of two new families of light-weight DLs, \(\mathcal{EL}\) and DL-Lite, which recently have been proposed as profiles of OWL 2, the new version of the OWL standard. In this paper, we give an introduction to these new logics, explaining the rationales behind their design.

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Notes

  1. http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/.

  2. All the systems mentioned above supported these two concept constructors, which were at that time viewed as being indispensable for a DL. The DL with exactly these two concept constructors is called \(\mathcal{FL}_{0}\) [4].

  3. http://www.ihtsdo.org/snomed-ct/.

  4. Note, however, that more recent versions of FaCT++ and Racer perform quite well on Snomed ct [52], due to optimizations specifically tailored towards the classification of Snomed ct.

  5. In this section, we do not introduce ABoxes and the instance problem. It should be noted, however, that the tractability results sketched in this section extend to the instance problem.

  6. http://cel.googlecode.com.

  7. The impact of dropping the UNA on the complexity of reasoning in the DL-Lite family has been investigated in [3].

  8. http://www.w3.org/TR/owl2-profiles/.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für Theoretische Informatik, TU Dresden, 01062, Dresden, Deutschland

    Franz Baader & Anni-Yasmin Turhan

  2. Universität Bremen, Fachbereich 03, Postfach 330440, 28334, Bremen, Deutschland

    Carsten Lutz

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  1. Franz Baader
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Correspondence to Franz Baader or Anni-Yasmin Turhan.

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Baader, F., Lutz, C. & Turhan, AY. Small is Again Beautiful in Description Logics. Künstl Intell 24, 25–33 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13218-010-0004-8

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