Department of Computer Science
University of Manchester
4pm 17 February 2004
Room 2511, JCMB, King's Buildings
Description Logics (DLs) are a family of knowledge representation formalisms closely related to modal logics that were designed for representation of and reasoning about the terminological knowledge of an application domain. It turned out that DLs are well-suited for providing a logical basis for ontology languages, which play, e.g., a major role in the Semantic Web. In the last decade, a lot of work on DLs was devoted to finding a good compromise between the expressive power of a DL and its computational complexity. One result of this work was the successful DL SHIQ which combines high expressive power with surprisingly good behaviour in many realistic applications.
In this talk, I will introduce ontology languages, their relationship with DLs, and how DL reasoners can be used to support ontology engineering. Moreover, I will talk about reasoning techniques employed for DLs.