Description Logics: a Nice Family of Logics

This is the course material to an introductory course given at ESSLLI 2012, called

Description Logics: a Nice Family of Logics

by Uli Sattler and Thomas Schneider. It is an introduction to Description Logics, aimed at anybody with a basic background in computer science or related areas. We tried to give a basic understanding of what Description Logics are, how they related to other logics and the Web Ontology Language OWL, sketched two approaches to reasoning, looked at some complexity results, and closed by discussing notions and applications of modularity and justifications.

Here is a table of contents with links to slides:

Introduction: syntax and semantics of ALC
Introduction: relationship between reasoning problems and relationships between Description Logics, First Order Logic, and Modal Logic
A tableau algorithm for ALC, and how to extend it for DLs with inverse roles and cardinality restrictions
An automata-based algorithm for ALC, and how to extend it for DLs with inverse roles
Some complexity and undecidability results
EL, a polynomial DL
Modularity and modules in DLs
Justifications for explanation and repair of entailments

The course was designed for ESSLLI 2012, but we reused existing material and mention numerous results that are not our own, in particular results by Franz Baader, Samantha Bail, Sebastian Brandt, Bernardo Cuenca-Grau, Yevgeny Kazakov, Boris Konev, Carsten Lutz, Matthew Horridge, Ian Horrocks, Bijan Parsia, Boontawee Suntisrivaraporn, Stephan Tobies, Dirk Walther, Frank Wolter.

Last modified: Tue Aug 14 16:27:37 CEST 2012