A Framework for Reasoning about Dynamic Axioms in Description Logics

A Framework for Reasoning about Dynamic Axioms in Description Logics

Bartosz Bednarczyk, Stephane Demri, Alessio Mansutti

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 1681-1687. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2020/233

Description logics are well-known logical formalisms for knowledge representation. We propose to enrich knowledge bases (KBs) with dynamic axioms that specify how the satisfaction of statements from the KBs evolves when the interpretation is decomposed or recomposed, providing a natural means to predict the evolution of interpretations. Our dynamic axioms borrow logical connectives from separation logics, well-known specification languages to verify programs with dynamic data structures. In the paper, we focus on ALC and EL augmented with dynamic axioms, or to their subclass of positive dynamic axioms. The knowledge base consistency problem in the presence of dynamic axioms is investigated, leading to interesting complexity results, among which the problem for EL with positive dynamic axioms is tractable, whereas EL with dynamic axioms is undecidable.
Keywords:
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Description Logics and Ontologies
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Logics for Knowledge Representation