Description Logics: Formal Foundation for Web Ontology Engineering

Abstract

Description logics (DL) constitute a family of formal knowledge representation languages used for ontology grounding, each of which comes with well-understood computational properties. A crucial design principle in description logics is to establish a favorable trade-off between expressivity and scalability and, when needed, maximize expressivity. Since the best balance between DL expressivity and reasoning complexity depends on the intended application, several description logics have been developed. The expressivity of DL-based ontologies is determined by the mathematical constructors available in the underlying description logic. Description logics used in multimedia representation and reasoning include not only general-purpose description logics, but also spatial, temporal, and fuzzy description logics.