Extending Unification in EL to Disunification: The Case of Dismatching and Local Disunification

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Contributors

Abstract

Unification in Description Logics has been introduced as a means to detect redundancies in ontologies. We try to extend the known decidability results for unification in the Description Logic εL to disunification since negative constraints can be used to avoid unwanted unifiers. While decidability of the solvability of general εL-disunification problems remains an open problem, we obtain NP-completeness results for two interesting special cases: dismatching problems, where one side of each negative constraint must be ground, and local solvability of disunification problems, where we consider only solutions that are constructed from terms occurring in the input problem. More precisely, we first show that dismatching can be reduced to local disunification, and then provide two complementary NP-algorithms for finding local solutions of disunification problems.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1-28
Number of pages28
JournalLogical Methods in Computer Science
Volume12
Issue number4
Publication statusPublished - 2016
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

Scopus 85041803182
ORCID /0000-0002-4049-221X/work/142247836

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