A computationally tractable terminological logic.
In Proceedings of SCAI-91, 3rd Scandinavian Conference
on Artificial Intelligence, pages 307--315, Roskilde, Denmark, 1991.
Abstract:
Terminological Logics are knowledge representation formalisms of enormous
applicative interest, as they are specifically oriented to the vast class of application
domains that are describable by means of taxonomic organizations of complex objects.
A number of results relative to the computational complexity of terminological logics
have recently appeared in the literature. Unfortunately, most of these results are
``negative" in nature, as they show that, in the logics they refer to, deciding
subsumption (i.e. the metalinguistic relation which corresponds to validity
in standard logics) is computationally intractable. In this paper, after briefly
introducing the fundamental concepts underlying terminological logics, we show that
computing subsumption is O(n log n) in the ALN logic, an extension
of Brachman and Levesque's FL- logic. ALN is obtained by endowing FL-
with the two operators atleast and atmost, which allow the specification
of number restrictions, and the operator a-not, which introduces a limited
form of negation. The result we present is of theoretical significance, in that ALN
is one of the few terminological logics that have been shown tractable. ALN
is also a pragmatically significant extension of FL-, as it results from the
addition of operators of considerable applicative interest.