Reasoning with individuals in concept languages

摘要

One of the main characteristics of knowledge representation systems based on the description of concepts is the clear distinction between terminological and assertional knowledge. Although this characteristic leads to several computational and representational advantages, it usually limits the expressive power of the system. For this reason, some attempts have been done, allowing for a limited form of amalgamation between the two components and a more complex interaction between them. In particular, one of these attempts is based on letting the individuals to be referenced in the concept expressions. This is generally performed by admitting a constructor for building a concept from a set of enumerated individuals. In this paper we investigate the consequences of introducing this type of constructors in the concept description language. We also provide a complete reasoning procedure to deal with these constructors and we obtain some complexity results on it.