Abstract
Description Logics (DLs) are a family of logic based knowledge representation formalisms. Although they have a range of applications (e.g., configuration and information integration), they are perhaps best known as the basis for widely used ontology languages such as OWL (now a W3C recommendation). This decision was motivated by a requirement that key inference problems be decidable, and that it should be possible to provide reasoning services to support ontology design and deployment. Such reasoning services are typically provided by highly optimised implementations of tableaux decision procedures; these have proved to be effective in applications in spite of the high worst case complexity of key inference problems. The increasing use of DL based ontologies in areas such as e-Science and the Semantic Web is, however, already stretching the capabilities of existing DL systems, and brings with it a range of research challenges.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Calvanese, D., De Giacomo, G., Lenzerini, M., Nardi, D., Rosati, R.: Description logic framework for information integration. In: Proc. of the 6th Int. Conf. on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR 1998), pp. 2–13 (1998)
Calvanese, D., De Giacomo, G., Lenzerini, M.: On the decidability of query containment under constraints. In: Proc. of the 17th ACM SIGACT SIGMOD SIGART Symp. on Principles of Database Systems (PODS 1998), pp. 149–158 (1998)
Horrocks, I., Tessaris, S., Sattler, U., Tobies, S.: How to decide query containment under constraints using a description logic. In: Proc. of the 7th Int. Workshop on Knowledge Representation meets Databases (KRDB 2000) CEUR (2000), http://ceur-ws.org/
Horrocks, I., Patel-Schneider, P.F., van Harmelen, F.: From \(\mathcal{SHIQ}\) and RDF to OWL: The making of a web ontology language. J. of Web Semantics 1, 7–26 (2003)
Knublauch, H., Fergerson, R., Noy, N., Musen, M.: The protégé OWL plugin: An open development environment for semantic web applications. In: McIlraith, S.A., Plexousakis, D., van Harmelen, F. (eds.) ISWC 2004. LNCS, vol. 3298, pp. 229–243. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Liebig, T., Noppens, O.: Ontotrack: Combining browsing and editing with reasoning and explaining for OWL Lite ontologies. In: McIlraith, S.A., Plexousakis, D., van Harmelen, F. (eds.) ISWC 2004. LNCS, vol. 3298, pp. 244–258. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Rector, A.L., Nowlan, W.A., Glowinski, A.: Goals for concept representation in the galen project. In: Proc. of the 17th Annual Symposium on Computer Applications in Medical Care (SCAMC 1993), Washington DC, USA, pp. 414–418 (1993)
Visser, U., Stuckenschmidt, H., Schuster, G., Vögele, T.: Ontologies for geographic information processing. Computers in Geosciences (to appear)
Oberle, D., Sabou, M., Richards, D.: An ontology for semantic middleware: extending daml-s beyond web-services. In: Proceedings of ODBASE 2003 (2003)
Wroe, C., Goble, C.A., Roberts, A., Greenwood, M.: A suite of DAML+OIL ontologies to describe bioinformatics web services and data. Int. J. of Cooperative Information Systems (2003); Special Issue on Bioinformatics
Berners-Lee, T., Hendler, J., Lassila, O.: The semantic Web. Scientific American 284, 34–43 (2001)
Paolucci, M., Ankolekar, A., Srinivasan, N., Sycara, K.: The DAML Services Coalition: DAML-S: Web service description for the semantic web. In: Fensel, D., Sycara, K., Mylopoulos, J. (eds.) ISWC 2003. LNCS, vol. 2870, pp. 290–305. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Uschold, M., King, M., Moralee, S., Zorgios, Y.: The enterprise ontology. Knowledge Engineering Review 13 (1998)
Stevens, R., Goble, C., Horrocks, I., Bechhofer, S.: Building a bioinformatics ontology using OIL. IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine 6, 135–141 (2002)
Rector, A., Horrocks, I.: Experience building a large, re-usable medical ontology using a description logic with transitivity and concept inclusions. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Ontological Engineering, AAAI Spring Symposium (AAAI 1997). AAAI Press, Menlo Park (1997)
Spackman, K.: Managing clinical terminology hierarchies using algorithmic calculation of subsumption: Experience with SNOMED-RT. J. of the Amer. Med. Informatics Ass. (2000); Fall Symposium Special Issue
Emmen, A.: The grid needs ontologies—onto-what? (2002), http://www.hoise.com/primeur/03/articles/monthly/AE-PR-02-03-7.html
Tuecke, S., Czajkowski, K., Foster, I., Frey, J., Graham, S., Kesselman, C., Vanderbilt, P.: Grid service specification (draft). GWD-I draft, GGF Open Grid Services Infrastructure Working Group (2002), http://www.globalgridforum.org/
Foster, I., Kesselman, C., Nick, J., Tuecke, S.: The physiology of the grid: An open grid services architecture for distributed systems integration (2002), http://www.globus.org/research/papers/ogsa.pdf
Wolstencroft, K., McEntire, R., Stevens, R., Tabernero, L., Brass, A.: Constructing Ontology-Driven Protein Family Databases. Bioinformatics 21, 1685–1692 (2005)
Horrocks, I., Tessaris, S.: Querying the semantic web: a formal approach. In: Horrocks, I., Hendler, J. (eds.) ISWC 2002, vol. 2342, pp. 177–191. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Horrocks, I., Sattler, U., Tobies, S.: Practical reasoning for expressive description logics. In: Ganzinger, H., McAllester, D., Voronkov, A. (eds.) LPAR 1999, vol. 1705, pp. 161–180. Springer, Heidelberg (1999)
Horrocks, I., Sattler, U.: A tableaux decision procedure for \(\mathcal{SHOIQ}\). In: Proc. of the 19th Int. Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2005 (2005) (to appear)
Baader, F., Calvanese, D., McGuinness, D., Nardi, D., Patel-Schneider, P.F. (eds.): The Description Logic Handbook: Theory, Implementation and Applications. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2003)
Baader, F., Hanschke, P.: A schema for integrating concrete domains into concept languages. In: Proc. of the 12th Int. Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 1991), pp. 452–457 (1991)
Blackburn, P., Seligman, J.: Hybrid languages. J. of Logic, Language and Information 4, 251–272 (1995)
Horrocks, I., Sattler, U.: Ontology reasoning in the \(\mathcal{SHOQ}\)(D) description logic. In: Proc. of the 17th Int. Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2001), pp. 199–204 (2001)
Donini, F.M., Lenzerini, M., Nardi, D., Nutt, W.: The complexity of concept languages. Information and Computation 134, 1–58 (1997)
Baader, F., Franconi, E., Hollunder, B., Nebel, B., Profitlich, H.J.: An empirical analysis of optimization techniques for terminological representation systems or: Making KRIS get a move on. Applied Artificial Intelligence. Special Issue on Knowledge Base Management 4, 109–132 (1994)
Horrocks, I.: The FaCT system. In: de Swart, H. (ed.) TABLEAUX 1998. LNCS, vol. 1397, pp. 307–312. Springer, Heidelberg (1998)
Patel-Schneider, P.F.: DLP system description. In: Proc. of the 1998 Description Logic Workshop (DL 1998), CEUR Electronic Workshop Proceedings, pp. 87–89 (1998), http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-11/
Haarslev, V., Möller, R.: RACER system description. In: Goré, R.P., Leitsch, A., Nipkow, T. (eds.) IJCAR 2001. LNCS, vol. 2083, pp. 701–705. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Pan, J.Z.: Description Logics: Reasoning Support for the Semantic Web. PhD thesis, University of Manchester (2004)
Horrocks, I., Sattler, U., Tobies, S.: Practical reasoning for very expressive description logics. J. of the Interest Group in Pure and Applied Logic 8, 239–264 (2000)
Bresciani, P., Franconi, E., Tessaris, S.: Implementing and testing expressive description logics: Preliminary report. In: Proc. of the 1995 Description Logic Workshop (DL 1995), pp. 131–139 (1995)
Horrocks, I.: Using an expressive description logic: FaCT or fiction? In: Proc. of the 6th Int. Conf. on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR 1998), pp. 636–647 (1998)
Patel-Schneider, P.F.: DLP. In: Proc. of the 1999 Description Logic Workshop (DL 1999), CEUR Electronic Workshop Proceedings, pp. 9–13 (1999), http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-22/
Horrocks, I., Patel-Schneider, P.F.: Optimizing description logic subsumption. J. of Logic and Computation 9, 267–293 (1999)
Horrocks, I., Tobies, S.: Reasoning with axioms: Theory and practice. In: Proc. of the 7th Int. Conf. on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR 2000), pp. 285–296 (2000)
Baker, A.B.: Intelligent Backtracking on Constraint Satisfaction Problems: Experimental and Theoretical Results. PhD thesis, University of Oregon (1995)
Oppacher, F., Suen, E.: HARP: A tableau-based theorem prover. J. of Automated Reasoning 4, 69–100 (1988)
Protégé (2003), http://protege.stanford.edu/
Wroe, C., Stevens, R., Goble, C.A., Ashburner, M.: A methodology to migrate the Gene Ontology to a description logic environment using DAML+OIL. In: Proc. of the 8th Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (PSB) (2003)
Rogers, J.E., Roberts, A., Solomon, W.D., van der Haring, E., Wroe, C.J., Zanstra, P.E., Rector, A.L.: GALEN ten years on: Tasks and supporting tools. In: Proc. of MEDINFO 2001, pp. 256–260 (2001)
Horrocks, I., Li, L., Turi, D., Bechhofer, S.: The instance store: DL reasoning with large numbers of individuals. In: Proc. of the 2004 Description Logic Workshop (DL 2004), pp. 31–40 (2004)
Bechhofer, S., Horrocks, I., Turi, D.: The OWL instance store: System description. In: Nieuwenhuis, R. (ed.) CADE 2005. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 3632, pp. 177–181. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Hustadt, U., Motik, B., Sattler, U.: Reducing SHIQ-description logic to disjunctive datalog programs. In: Proc. of the 9th Int. Conf. on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR 2004), pp. 152–162 (2004)
Motik, B., Sattler, U., Studer, R.: Query answering for OWL-DL with rules. In: McIlraith, S.A., Plexousakis, D., van Harmelen, F. (eds.) ISWC 2004, vol. 3298, pp. 549–563. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Rector, A.: Analysis of propagation along transitive roles: Formalisation of the galen experience with medical ontologies. In: Proc. of DL 2002, CEUR (2002), http://ceur-ws.org/
Schulz, S., Hahn, U.: Parts, locations, and holes - formal reasoning about anatomical structures. In: Quaglini, S., Barahona, P., Andreassen, S. (eds.) AIME 2001. LNCS, vol. 2101, p. 293. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Tsarkov, D., Riazanov, A., Bechhofer, S., Horrocks, I.: Using Vampire to reason with OWL. In: McIlraith, S.A., Plexousakis, D., van Harmelen, F. (eds.) ISWC 2004. LNCS, vol. 3298, pp. 471–485. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Eiter, T., Lukasiewicz, T., Schindlauer, R., Tompits, H.: Combining answer set programming with description logics for the semantic web. In: Proc. of the 9th Int. Conf. on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR 2004), pp. 141–151. Morgan Kaufmann, Los Altos (2004)
Rosati, R.: On the decidability and complexity of integrating ontologies and rules. J. of Web Semantics 3, 61–73 (2005)
Schlobach, S., Cornet, R.: Explanation of terminological reason-ing: A preliminary report. In: Proc. of the 2003 Description Logic Workshop, DL 2003 (2003)
McGuinness, D.L.: Explaining Reasoning in Description Logics. PhD thesis, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (1996)
Borgida, A., Franconi, E., Horrocks, I.: Explaining \(\mathcal{ALC}\) subsumption. In: Proc. of the 14th Eur. Conf. on Artificial Intelligence, ECAI 2000 (2000)
Baader, F., Küsters, R., Borgida, A., McGuinness, D.L.: Matching in description logics. J. of Logic and Computation 9, 411–447 (1999)
Brandt, S., Turhan, A.Y.: Using non-standard inferences in description logics — what does it buy me? In: Proc. of KI 2001 Workshop on Applications of Description Logics (KIDLWS 2001). CEUR, vol. 44 (2001), http://ceur-ws.org/
Küsters, R.: Non-Standard Inferences in Description Logics. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2100. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Brandt, S., Küsters, R., Turhan, A.Y.: Approximation and difference in description logics. In: Proc. of the 8th Int. Conf. on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR 2002), pp. 203–214 (2002)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Horrocks, I. (2005). Description Logics in Ontology Applications. In: Beckert, B. (eds) Automated Reasoning with Analytic Tableaux and Related Methods. TABLEAUX 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3702. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11554554_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11554554_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-28931-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31822-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)