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Description Logics

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Encyclopedia of Database Systems

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Synonyms

Terminologic languages; KL-ONE style languages; Concept 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 (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

  1. Baader F., Calvanese D., McGuinness D.L., Nardi D., and Patel-Schneider P.F. The Description Logic Handbook: Theory, Implementation, and Applications, 2nd edn. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

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  7. Horrocks I. and Tessaris S. A conjunctive query language for description logic aboxes. In Proc. 12th National Conf. on AI, 2000, pp. 399–404.

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  8. OWL Web Ontology Language Reference, http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-ref/

  9. Toman D. and Weddell G. On keys and functional dependencies as first-class citizens in description logics. J. Auto. Reason., 40(2–3): 117–132, 2008.

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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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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Borgida, A. (2009). Description Logics. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_1310

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