ECAI 2004 Conference Paper

[full paper]

Description Logics with Concrete Domains and Functional Dependencies

Carsten Lutz, Maja Milicic

Description Logics (DLs) with concrete domains are a useful tool in many applications. To further enhance the expressive power of such DLs, it has been proposed to add database-style key constraints. Up to now, however, only uniqueness constraints have been considered in this context, thus neglecting the second fundamental family of key constraints: functional dependencies. In this paper, we consider the basic DL with concrete domains ALC(D), extend it with functional dependencies, and analyze the impact of this extension on the decidability and complexity of reasoning. Though intuitively the expressivity of functional dependencies seems weaker than that of uniqueness constraints, we are able to show that the former have a similarly severe impact on the computational properties: reasoning is undecidable in the general case, and NExpTime-complete in some slightly restricted variants of our logic.

Keywords: Description Logics

Citation: Carsten Lutz, Maja Milicic: Description Logics with Concrete Domains and Functional Dependencies. In R.López de Mántaras and L.Saitta (eds.): ECAI2004, Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2004, pp.378-382.