Mainstream research in Description Logics (DLs) until recently concentrated on increasing the expressive power of the employed description language while keeping standard inference problems like subsumption and instance manageable in the sense that highly optimized reasoning procedures for them behave well in practice. One of the main successes of this line of research was the adoption of OWL DL, which is based on an expressive DL, as the standard ontology language for the Semantic Web.

More recently, there has been a growing interest in more light-weight DLs, and in other kinds of inference problems, mainly triggered by need in applications with large-scale ontologies. In this paper, we first review the DL research leading to the very expressive DLs with practical inference procedures underlying OWL, and then sketch the recent development of light-weight DLs and novel inference procedures.