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).

The development of OIL was inspired by DL.

See also

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

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/