Reasoning in the Description Logic ALC under Category Semantics
This work addresses complexity issues in description logics for knowledge representation, offering a modular approach that enables the definition of a previously undefinable sublogic.
The paper tackles the problem of reasoning in the description logic ALC by reformulating its semantics using category theory, resulting in a new sublogic with PSPACE complexity for concept satisfiability.
We present in this paper a reformulation of the usual set-theoretical semantics of the description logic $\mathcal{ALC}$ with general TBoxes by using categorical language. In this setting, $\mathcal{ALC}$ concepts are represented as objects, concept subsumptions as arrows, and memberships as logical quantifiers over objects and arrows of categories. Such a category-based semantics provides a more modular representation of the semantics of $\mathcal{ALC}$. This feature allows us to define a sublogic of $\mathcal{ALC}$ by dropping the interaction between existential and universal restrictions, which would be responsible for an exponential complexity in space. Such a sublogic is undefinable in the usual set-theoretical semantics, We show that this sublogic is {\sc{PSPACE}} by proposing a deterministic algorithm for checking concept satisfiability which runs in polynomial space.