Description Logics are a family of knowledge representation languages which can be used to represent the terminological knowledge of an application domain in a structured and formally well-understood way. The name description logic refers, on the one hand, to concept descriptions used to describe a domain and, on the other hand to the logic-based semantics which can be given by a translation into first-order predicate logic. (DL) was designed as an extension to frames and semantic networks, which were not equipped with a formal logic-based semantics.

Description Logic was given its current name in the 1980s. Previous to this it was called (chronologically): terminological systems, and concept languages. Today Description Logic has become a cornerstone of the Semantic Web for its use in the design of ontologies.

The first DL-based system was KL-ONE (by Brachman and Schmolze, 1985). Some other DL systems came later. They are LOOM (1987), BACK (1988), KRIS (1991), CLASSIC (1991), FaCT (1998) and lately RACER (2001) and KAON 2 (2005).

The development of OIL was inspired by DL.

See also

• Semantic Web
• Ontology (computer science)
• DAML+OIL
• OWL
• RACER system
• KAON

References

• F. Baader, D. Calvanese, D. L. McGuiness, D. Nardi, P. F. Patel-Schneider: The Description Logic Handbook: Theory, Implementation, Applications. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2003

External links

• http://dl.kr.org/