The Description Logic Handbook

This introduction presents the main motivations for the development of Description Logics (DLs) as a formalism for representing knowledge, as well as some important basic notions underlying all systems that have been created in the DL tradition. In addition, we provide the reader with an overview of the entire book and some guidelines for reading it. We first address the relationship between Description Logics and earlier semantic network and frame systems, which represent the original heritage of the field. We delve into some of the key problems encountered with the older efforts. Subsequently, we introduce the basic features of DL languages and related reasoning techniques. DL languages are then viewed as…