Practical Reasoning for Expressive Description Logics

05/10/2000

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by   Ian Horrocks, et al.

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Description Logics (DLs) are a family of knowledge representation formalisms mainly characterised by constructors to build complex concepts and roles from atomic ones. Expressive role constructors are important in many applications, but can be computationally problematical. We present an algorithm that decides satisfiability of the DL ALC extended with transitive and inverse roles, role hierarchies, and qualifying number restrictions. Early experiments indicate that this algorithm is well-suited for implementation. Additionally, we show that ALC extended with just transitive and inverse roles is still in PSPACE. Finally, we investigate the limits of decidability for this family of DLs.