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Description Logics with inverse roles, functional restrictions, and n-ary relations

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Logics in Artificial Intelligence (JELIA 1994)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 838))

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Abstract

Description Logics (DLs) are used in Artificial Intelligence to represent knowledge in terms of objects grouped into classes, and offer structuring mechanisms for both characterizing the relevant properties of classes in terms of binary relations, and establishing several interdependencies among classes. One of the main themes in the area of DLs has been to identify DLs that are both very expressive and decidable. This issue can be profitably addressed by relying on a correspondence between DLs and propositional dynamic logics (PDLs). In this paper, we exploit the correspondence as a framework to investigate the decidability and the complexity of a powerful DL, in which functional restrictions on both atomic roles and their inverse are expressible. We then show that such DL is suitable to represent n-ary relations, as needed in the applications of class-based formalisms to databases. The PDL that we use in this work is a proper extension of Converse Deterministic PDL, and its decidability and complexity is established contextually.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, Via Salaria 113, 00198, Roma, Italia

    Giuseppe De Giacomo & Maurizio Lenzerini

Authors
  1. Giuseppe De Giacomo
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  2. Maurizio Lenzerini
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Editor information

Craig MacNish David Pearce Luís Moniz Pereira

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© 1994 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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De Giacomo, G., Lenzerini, M. (1994). Description Logics with inverse roles, functional restrictions, and n-ary relations. In: MacNish, C., Pearce, D., Pereira, L.M. (eds) Logics in Artificial Intelligence. JELIA 1994. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 838. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0021982

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0021982

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-58332-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-48657-2

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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