Description Logics

Abstract

In this chapter, we explain what description logics are and why they make good ontology languages. In particular, we introduce the description logic cluding OWL.We argue that, without the last decade of basic research in description SHIQ, which has formed the basis of several well-known ontology languages, in- logics, this family of knowledge representation languages could not have played such an important rˆole in this context. Description logic reasoning can be used both during the design phase, in order to improve the quality of ontologies, and in the deployment phase, in order to exploit the rich structure of ontologies and ontology based information. We discuss the extensions to SHIQ that are required for languages such as OWL and, finally, we sketch how novel reasoning services can support building ontologies. 1