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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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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