Decision Procedures for Expressive Description Logics with Intersection, Composition, Converse of Roles and Role Identity

Fabio Massacci

Abstract: In the quest for expressive description logics for real-world applications, a powerful combination of constructs has so far eluded practical decision procedures: intersection and composition of roles. We propose tableau-based decision procedures for the satisfiability of logics extending ALC with the intersectionu, composition◦, uniont, converse ·− of roles and role identity id(·). We show that 1. the satisfiability of ALC(u,◦,t), for which a 2-EXPTIME upper bound was given by treeautomata techniques, is PSPACE-complete; 2. the satisfiability of ALC(u,◦,t, ·−, id(·)), an open problem so far, is in NEXPTIME.