The DL-Lite Family and Relations

Technical Report, School of Computer Science and Information Systems, Birbeck College. Technical Report BBKCS-09-03 2009.

The recently introduced series of description logics under the common moniker `DL-Lite' has attracted attention of the description logic and semantic web communities due to the low computational complexity of inference, on the one hand, and the ability to represent conceptual modeling formalisms, on the other. The main aim of this article is to carry out a thorough and systematic investigation of inference in the logics of the è xtended DL-Lite family,' under a variety of combinations of constructs and under different semantic assumptions. Specifically, we extend the original DL-Lite logics along five axes: by (i) adding the Boolean connectives, (ii) adding number restrictions to concept constructs, (iii) allowing role hierarchies, (iv) allowing role disjointness, symmetry, asymmetry, reflexivity, irreflexivity and transitivity constraints, and (v) adopting or dropping the unique name assumption. We analyze the combined complexity of satisfiability for the resulting logics, as well as the data complexity of instance checking and answering positive existential queries. Our approach is based on considering DL-Lite logics as suitable fragments of first-order logic, which provides useful insights into their properties and, in particular, computational behavior.

@techreport{TR-BBKCS-2009-03,
   title = "The DL-Lite  Family and Relations",
   year = "2009",
   author = "Alessandro Artale and Diego Calvanese and Roman Kontchakov
and Michael Zakharyaschev",
  institution = "School of Computer Science and Information Systems, Birbeck
College",
   number = "BBKCS-09-03",
}