Description logic

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Short description: Family of formal knowledge representation

Description logics (DL) are a family of formal knowledge representation languages. Many DLs are more expressive than propositional logic but less expressive than first-order logic. In contrast to the latter, the core reasoning problems for DLs are (usually) decidable, and efficient decision procedures have been designed and implemented for these problems. There are general, spatial, temporal, spatiotemporal, and fuzzy description logics, and each description logic features a different balance between expressive power and reasoning complexity by supporting different sets of mathematical constructors.[1]

DLs are used in artificial intelligence to describe and reason about the relevant concepts of an application domain (known as terminological knowledge). It is of particular importance in providing a logical formalism for ontologies and the Semantic Web: the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and its profiles are based on DLs. The most notable application of DLs and OWL is in biomedical informatics where DL assists in the codification of biomedical knowledge.[citation needed]

Introduction

A description logic (DL) models concepts, roles and individuals, and their relationships.

The fundamental modeling concept of a DL is the axiom—a logical statement relating roles and/or concepts.[2] This is a key difference from the frames paradigm where a frame specification declares and completely defines a class.[2]

Nomenclature

Terminology compared to FOL and OWL

The description logic community uses different terminology than the first-order logic (FOL) community for operationally equivalent notions; some examples are given below. The Web Ontology Language (OWL) uses again a different terminology, also given in the table below.

Synonyms
FOL OWL DL
constant individual individual
unary predicate class concept
binary predicate property role

Naming convention

There are many varieties of description logics and there is an informal naming convention, roughly describing the operators allowed. The expressivity is encoded in the label for a logic starting with one of the following basic logics:

[math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{AL} }[/math] Attributive language. This is the base language which allows:
  • Atomic negation (negation of concept names that do not appear on the left-hand side of axioms)
  • Concept intersection
  • Universal restrictions
  • Limited existential quantification
  • Concept intersection
  • Universal restrictions
  • Limited existential quantification
  • Role restriction
[math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{EL} }[/math] Existential language, allows:
  • Concept intersection
  • Existential restrictions (of full existential quantification)

Followed by any of the following extensions:

[math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{F} }[/math] Functional properties, a special case of uniqueness quantification.
[math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{E} }[/math] Full existential qualification (existential restrictions that have fillers other than [math]\displaystyle{ \top }[/math]).
[math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{U} }[/math] Concept union.
[math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{C} }[/math] Complex concept negation.
[math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{H} }[/math] Role hierarchy (subproperties: rdfs:subPropertyOf).
[math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{R} }[/math] Limited complex role inclusion axioms; reflexivity and irreflexivity; role disjointness.
[math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{O} }[/math] Nominals. (Enumerated classes of object value restrictions: owl:oneOf, owl:hasValue).
[math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{I} }[/math] Inverse properties.
[math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{N} }[/math] Cardinality restrictions (owl:cardinality, owl:maxCardinality), a special case of counting quantification
[math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{Q} }[/math] Qualified cardinality restrictions (available in OWL 2, cardinality restrictions that have fillers other than [math]\displaystyle{ \top }[/math]).
[math]\displaystyle{ ^\mathcal{(D)} }[/math] Use of datatype properties, data values or data types.

Exceptions

Some canonical DLs that do not exactly fit this convention are:

[math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{S} }[/math] An abbreviation for [math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{ALC} }[/math] with transitive roles.
[math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{FL^-} }[/math] A sub-language of [math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{FL} }[/math], which is obtained by disallowing role restriction. This is equivalent to [math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{AL} }[/math] without atomic negation.
[math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{FL}_o }[/math] A sub-language of [math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{FL^-} }[/math], which is obtained by disallowing limited existential quantification.

Examples

As an example, [math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{ALC} }[/math] is a centrally important description logic from which comparisons with other varieties can be made. [math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{ALC} }[/math] is simply [math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{AL} }[/math] with complement of any concept allowed, not just atomic concepts. [math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{ALC} }[/math] is used instead of the equivalent [math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{ALUE} }[/math].

A further example, the description logic [math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{SHIQ} }[/math] is the logic [math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{ALC} }[/math] plus extended cardinality restrictions, and transitive and inverse roles. The naming conventions aren't purely systematic so that the logic [math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{ALCOIN} }[/math] might be referred to as [math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{ALCNIO} }[/math] and other abbreviations are also made where possible.

The Protégé ontology editor supports [math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{SHOIN}^\mathcal{(D)} }[/math]. Three major biomedical informatics terminology bases, SNOMED CT, GALEN, and GO, are expressible in [math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{EL} }[/math] (with additional role properties).

OWL 2 provides the expressiveness of [math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{SROIQ}^\mathcal{(D)} }[/math], OWL-DL is based on [math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{SHOIN}^\mathcal{(D)} }[/math], and for OWL-Lite it is [math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{SHIF}^\mathcal{(D)} }[/math].

History

Description logic was given its current name in the 1980s. Previous to this it was called (chronologically): terminological systems, and concept languages.

Knowledge representation

Frames and semantic networks lack formal (logic-based) semantics.[3] DL was first introduced into knowledge representation (KR) systems to overcome this deficiency.[3]

The first DL-based KR system was KL-ONE (by Ronald J. Brachman and Schmolze, 1985). During the '80s other DL-based systems using structural subsumption algorithms[3] were developed including KRYPTON (1983), LOOM (1987), BACK (1988), K-REP (1991) and CLASSIC (1991). This approach featured DL with limited expressiveness but relatively efficient (polynomial time) reasoning.[3]

In the early '90s, the introduction of a new tableau based algorithm paradigm allowed efficient reasoning on more expressive DL.[3] DL-based systems using these algorithms — such as KRIS (1991) — show acceptable reasoning performance on typical inference problems even though the worst case complexity is no longer polynomial.[3]

From the mid '90s, reasoners were created with good practical performance on very expressive DL with high worst case complexity.[3] Examples from this period include FaCT,[4] RACER (2001), CEL (2005), and KAON 2 (2005).

DL reasoners, such as FaCT, FaCT++,[4] RACER, DLP and Pellet,[5] implement the method of analytic tableaux. KAON2 is implemented by algorithms which reduce a SHIQ(D) knowledge base to a disjunctive datalog program.

Semantic web

The DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) and Ontology Inference Layer (OIL) ontology languages for the Semantic Web can be viewed as syntactic variants of DL.[6] In particular, the formal semantics and reasoning in OIL use the [math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{SHIQ} }[/math] DL.[7] The DAML+OIL DL was developed as a submission to[8]—and formed the starting point of—the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Ontology Working Group.[9] In 2004, the Web Ontology Working Group completed its work by issuing the OWL[10] recommendation. The design of OWL is based on the [math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{SH} }[/math] family of DL[11] with OWL DL and OWL Lite based on [math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{SHOIN}^\mathcal{(D)} }[/math] and [math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{SHIF}^\mathcal{(D)} }[/math] respectively.[11]

The W3C OWL Working Group began work in 2007 on a refinement of - and extension to - OWL.[12] In 2009, this was completed by the issuance of the OWL2 recommendation.Cite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag

Examples

Syntactic variants
DL ML
[math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{ALC} }[/math] K[3]
[math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{SR} }[/math] PDL[13]
[math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{FSR} }[/math] DPDL (deterministic PDL)[13]
[math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{TSL}\text{, or }\mathcal{SRI} }[/math] Converse-PDL[13]
[math]\displaystyle{ \mathcal{FSL}\text{, or }\mathcal{FSRI} }[/math] Converse-DPDL (deterministic PDL)[13]

Temporal description logic

Temporal description logic represents—and allows reasoning about—time dependent concepts and many different approaches to this problem exist.[14] For example, a description logic might be combined with a modal temporal logic such as linear temporal logic.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Sikos, Leslie F. (2017). Description Logics in Multimedia Reasoning. Cham: Springer International Publishing. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-54066-5. ISBN 978-3-319-54066-5. https://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319540658. 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Grau, B. C.; Horrocks, I.; Motik, B.; Parsia, B.; Patel-Schneider, P. F.; Sattler, U. (2008). "OWL 2: The next step for OWL". Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web 6 (4): 309–322. doi:10.1016/j.websem.2008.05.001. http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/boris.motik/pubs/ghmppss08next-steps.pdf. 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 Franz Baader, Ian Horrocks, and Ulrike Sattler Chapter 3 Description Logics. In Frank van Harmelen, Vladimir Lifschitz, and Bruce Porter, editors, Handbook of Knowledge Representation. Elsevier, 2007.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Tsarkov, D.; Horrocks, I. (2006). "FaCT++ Description Logic Reasoner: System Description". Automated Reasoning. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 4130. pp. 292–297. doi:10.1007/11814771_26. ISBN 978-3-540-37187-8. http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/ian.horrocks/Publications/download/2006/TsHo06a.pdf. 
  5. ↑ Sirin, E.; Parsia, B.; Grau, B. C.; Kalyanpur, A.; Katz, Y. (2007). "Pellet: A practical OWL-DL reasoner". Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web 5 (2): 51–53. doi:10.1016/j.websem.2007.03.004. http://pellet.owldl.com/papers/sirin05pellet.pdf. 
  6. ↑ Ian Horrocks and Ulrike Sattler Ontology Reasoning in the SHOQ(D) Description Logic, in Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2001.
  7. ↑ Fensel, D.; Van Harmelen, F.; Horrocks, I.; McGuinness, D. L.; Patel-Schneider, P. F. (2001). "OIL: An ontology infrastructure for the Semantic Web". IEEE Intelligent Systems 16 (2): 38–45. doi:10.1109/5254.920598. 
  8. ↑ Ian Horrocks and Peter F. Patel-Schneider The Generation of DAML+OIL. In Proceedings of the 2001 Description Logic Workshop (DL 2001), volume 49 of CEUR <http://ceur-ws.org/>, pages 30–35, 2001.
  9. ↑ Web Ontology Working Group Charter, 2003
  10. ↑ W3C Press Release, 2004
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Horrocks, I.; Patel-Schneider, Peter; van Harmelen, Frank (2003). "From SHIQ and RDF to OWL: The making of a Web Ontology Language". Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web 1: 7–26. doi:10.1016/j.websem.2003.07.001. http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/people/ian.horrocks/Publications/download/2003/HoPH03a.pdf. 
  12. ↑ OWL Working Group Charter, 2007
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 13.3 Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named CTTL
  14. ↑ Alessandro Artale and Enrico Franconi "Temporal Description Logics". In "Handbook of Temporal Reasoning in Artificial Intelligence", 2005.

Further reading

External links

Reasoners

There are some semantic reasoners that deal with OWL and DL. These are some of the most popular:

  • CEL is an open source LISP-based reasoner (Apache 2.0 License).
  • Cerebra Engine was a commercial C++-based reasoner, acquired in 2006 by webMethods.
  • FaCT++ is a free open-source C++-based reasoner.
  • KAON2 is a free (for non-commercial use) Java-based reasoner, offering fast reasoning support for OWL ontologies.
  • MSPASS is a free open-source C reasoner for numerous DL models.
  • Pellet is a dual-licensed (AGPL and proprietary) commercial, Java-based reasoner.
  • RacerPro of Racer Systems was a commercial (free trials and research licenses are available) lisp-based reasoner, today both an open source version of RACER exists from the original developers at Lübeck University using the BSD 3 license, and also a commercialized version, still named RacerPro by Franz Inc.
  • Sim-DL is a free open-source Java-based reasoner for the language ALCHQ. It also provides a similarity measurement functionality between concepts. To access this functionality a Protégé plugin can be used.
  • HermiT is an open-source reasoner based on the "hypertableau" calculus. It is developed by the University of Oxford.
  • Owlready2 is a package for ontology-oriented programming in Python. It can load OWL 2.0 ontologies as Python objects, modify them, save them, and perform reasoning via HermiT (included). Owlready2 allows a transparent access to OWL ontologies (contrary to usual Java-based API).

Editors

Interfaces



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