Probabilistic query answering in the Bayesian description logic BεL

Abstract

BεL is a probabilistic description logic (DL) that extends the light-weight DL εL with a joint probability distribution over the axioms, expressed with the help of a Bayesian network (BN). In recent work it has been shown that the complexity of standard logical reasoning in BEL is the same as performing probabilistic inferences over the BN. In this paper we consider conjunctive query answering in BεL. We study the complexity of the three main problems associated to this setting: computing the probability of a query entailment, computing the most probable answers to a query, and computing the most probable context in which a query is entailed. In particular, we show that all these problems are tractable w.r.t. data and ontology complexity.