Description Logics for Ontologies

Description Logics (DLs) are a family of knowledge representation
formalisms designed for representing and reasoning about the
terminological knowledge of an application domain. It turned out that
DLs are well-suited for providing a logical basis for Semantic Web
ontology languages. In the last decade, a lot of work 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 description logics and illustrate the
various expressive means of SHIQ. Then I will talk about some
advanced aspects of DLs: extensions of SHIQ for the propagation of one
property along another one, finite model reasoning, and the
combination of concrete domains and key constraints.