Reasoning and query answering in description logics

Abstract

Description Logics (DLs) play a central role as formalisms for representing ontologies and reasoning about them. This lecture introduces the basics of DLs. We discuss the knowledge modeling capabilities of some of the most prominent DLs, including expressive ones, and present some DL reasoning services. Particular attention is devoted to the query answering problem, and to the increasingly popular framework in which data repositories are queried through DL ontologies. We give an overview of the main challenges that arise in this setting, survey some query answering techniques for both lightweight and expressive DLs, and give an overview of the computational complexity landscape. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.