载右挠讨易.PDFVIP

A Description Logic with Transitive and Inverse Roles and Role Hierarchies IAN HORROCKS, Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK. E-mail: horrocks@cs.man.ac.uk ULRIKE SATTLER, LuF G Theoretical Computer Science, R WTH Aachen, Theoretische Informatik, Ahornstr. 55, D-52074 Aachen, Germany. E-mail: uli@cantor.informatik.rwth-aachen.de Abstract The combination of transitive and inverse roles is imp ortant in a range of applications, and is crucial for the adequate representation of aggregated ob jects, allowing the simultaneous description of parts by means of the whole to which they b elong and of wholes by means of their constituent parts. In this pap er we present tableaux algorithms for deciding concept satisability and subsumption in Description Logics that extend ALC with b oth transitive and inverse roles, a role hierarchy, and functional restrictions. In contrast to earlier algorithms for similar logics, those presented here are well-suited for implementation purp oses: using transitive roles and role hierarchies in place of the transitive closure of roles enables sophisticated blo cking techniques to b e used in place of the cut rule, a rule whose high degree of non-determinism strongly discourages its use in an implementation. As well as promising sup erior computational b ehaviour, this new approach is shown to b e suÆciently p owerful to allow subsumption and satisability with resp ect to a (p ossibly cyclic) knowledge base to b e reduced to concept subsumption and satisability, and to supp ort reasoning in a Description Logic that no longer has the nite mo del prop erty. Keywords : Knowledge representation, description logics, transitivity, algorithms. 1