Representing ontologies using description logics, description graphs, and rules Original Research Article

Description logics (DLs) are a family of state-of-the-art knowledge representation languages, and their expressive power has been carefully crafted to provide useful knowledge modeling primitives while allowing for practically effective decision procedures for the basic reasoning problems. Recent experience with DLs, however, has shown that their expressivity is often insufficient to accurately describe structured objects—objects whose parts are interconnected in arbitrary, rather than tree-like ways. DL knowledge bases describing structured objects are therefore usually underconstrained, which precludes the entailment of certain consequences and causes performance problems during reasoning. To address this problem, we propose an extension of DL languages with description graphs—a knowledge modeling construct that can accurately describe objects with parts connected in arbitrary ways. Furthermore, to enable modeling the conditional aspects of structured objects, we also extend DLs with rules. We present an in-depth study of the computational properties of such a formalism. In particular, we first identify the sources of undecidability of the general, unrestricted formalism. Based on that analysis, we then investigate several restrictions of the general formalism that make reasoning decidable. We present practical evidence that such a logic can be used to model nontrivial structured objects. Finally, we present a practical decision procedure for our formalism, as well as tight complexity bounds.