Deciding Unifiability and Computing Local Unifiers in the Description Logic EL without Top Constructor

Publikation: Beitrag in FachzeitschriftForschungsartikelBeigetragenBegutachtung

Beitragende

Abstract

Unification in description logics has been proposed as a novel inference service that can, for example, be used to detect redundancies in ontologies. The inexpressive description logic EL is of particular interest in this context since, on the one hand, several large biomedical ontologies are defined using EL. On the other hand, unification in EL has been shown to be NP-complete and, thus, of considerably lower complexity than unification in other description logics of similarly restricted expressive power. However, EL allows the use of the top concept (T), which represents the whole interpretation domain, whereas the large medical ontology SNOMEDCT makes no use of this feature. Surprisingly, removing the top concept from EL makes the unification problem considerably harder. More precisely, we will show that unification in EL without the top concept is PSpace-complete. In addition to the decision problem, we also consider the problem of actually computing EL-T-unifiers.

Details

OriginalspracheEnglisch
Seiten (von - bis)443 - 476
Seitenumfang34
FachzeitschriftNotre Dame Journal of Formal Logic
Jahrgang57
Ausgabenummer4
PublikationsstatusVeröffentlicht - 2016
Peer-Review-StatusJa

Externe IDs

Scopus 84992597304
ORCID /0000-0002-4049-221X/work/142247880

Schlagworte

Bibliotheksschlagworte