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Description Logics

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  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Database Systems

Synonyms

Concept languages; KL-ONE style languages; Terminologic languages

Definition

Description Logics (DLs) are a family of knowledge representation languages providing features for defining and describing concepts. The associated formal logics answer such questions as “ Is concept C or knowledge base T consistent?” and “Is concept A more specific than (subsumed by) concept B?”

DLs view the world as being populated by individuals, grouped into classes (“concepts”), and related by binary relationships (“roles”). DLs define concepts recursively starting from atomic identifiers by using concept and role constructors. A key characteristic of every DL’s expressiveness is therefore the set of constructors it supports. The collection of constructors considered has been determined empirically, by experience with a variety of tasks in Natural Language processing and other subfields of Artificial Intelligence. Considerable research has been devoted to finding the complexity of reasoning with...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

    Alexander Borgida

Authors
  1. Alexander Borgida
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alexander Borgida .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Fac. of IE & Mgmt., Technion--Israel Inst. of Technology, Haifa, Israel

    Avigdor Gal

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Borgida, A. (2018). Description Logics. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_1310

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