Reasoning in description logics using declarative logic programming

Guray Alsac and Chitta Baral.

Abstract

In this paper our goal is to bridge two popular and well-studied knowledge representation formalisms: description logics (DLs), and declarative logic programs (DLPs). In recent years there has been tremendous development in both fields in terms of theoretical studies and implementations. However, despite a few papers on allowing logic programming style rules in description logic, there has been little research on how they relate to each other, how one can be simulated by the other, and how ideas and constructs in one can be used in the other. We show that DLs can be simulated in DLPs and point out why early description logic researchers thought this was not possible. Besides giving a general translation that produces a not so efficient DLP we consider special cases for which more efficient DLPs can be constructed. We also suggest new DL constructs inspired by DLPs.