Reasoning with Attributed Description Logics

In modelling real-world knowledge, there often arises a need to represent and reason with meta-knowledge. To equip description logics (DLs) for dealing with such ontologies, we enrich DL concepts and roles with finite sets of attribute– value pairs, called annotations, and allow concept inclusions to express constraints on annotations. We show that this may lead to increased complexity or even undecidability, and we identify cases where this increased expressivity can be achieved without incurring increased complexity of reasoning. In particular, we describe a tractable fragment based on the lightweight description logic EL.