language: en

Description Logics are not just for the Flightless-Birds: A New Look at the Utility and Foundations of Description Logics

Alex Borgida
Dept. of Computer Science Rutgers University
New Brunswick, NJ 08904
June 1992

Abstract This paper presents some of the underlying principles of description logics (also known as terminological logics or kl-one-style languages), grounding them in the lattice of terms organized by the so-called "subsumption" relationship. A survey of the increasingly varied uses of description logics, including industrial applications, is presented by considering their role in a number of different operations that one can apply to a knowledge base, including languages for queries, answers, updates, rules, and constraints. Finally, we discuss some of the complexity results related to the logics of descriptions, and survey a spectrum of responses to the many intractability proofs.