Description logics for the representation of aggregated objects
Ulrike Sattler · 2000
. Aggregated objects play an important role in many knowledge representation applications. For the adequate representation of aggregated objects, it is crucial to represent part-whole relations. We discuss properties of part-whole relations and extend the description logic ALC with means for the adequate representation of part-whole relations and thus of aggregated objects. 1 Motivation Description logics are a family of knowledge representation formalisms well-suited for the representation of and reasoning about configurations [27, 21], ontologies [19], and database schemata, where they can support schema design, evolution, and query optimisation [4, 7], source integration in heterogeneous databases/data warehouses [5, 6], and conceptual modeling of multidimensional aggregation [11]. In all these applications, aggregated objects play a central role, that is, objects that are composed of various parts, which again can be composite, etc. It is natural to describe an aggregated object...