文档介绍：Description Logics as Ontology Languages for
the Semantic Web
Franz Baader1, Ian Horrocks2, and Ulrike Sattler1
1 puter Science, RWTH Aachen, Germany
{baader,sattler}***@-
2 Department puter Science, University of Manchester, UK
******@
Abstract. The vision of a Semantic Web has recently drawn consider-
able attention, both from academia and industry. Description logics are
often named as one of the tools that can support the Semantic Web and
thus help to make this vision reality.
In this paper, we describe what description logics are and what they can
do for the Semantic Web. Descriptions logics are very useful for defining,
integrating, and maintaining ontologies, which provide the Semantic Web
with mon understanding of the basic semantic concepts used to
annotate Web pages. We also argue that, without the last decade of basic
research in this area, description logics could not play such an important
rˆolein this domain.
1 Introduction
The goal of this introduction is to sketch, on an informal level, what the Se-
mantic Web is, why it needs ontologies, and where description e into
play. Regarding the last point, we will first give a brief introduction to descrip-
tion logics, and then argue why they are well-suited as ontology languages. The
remainder of this paper will then put some flesh on this skeleton by providing
more technical details.
The Semantic Web and Ontologies
For many people, the World Wide Web has e an indispensable means of
providing and searching for information. Searching the Web in its current form
is, however, often an infuriating experience since today’s search engines usually
provide a huge number of answers, many of which pletely irrelevant,
whereas some of the more interesting answers are not found. One of the rea-
sons for this unsatisfactory state of affairs is that existing Web resources are
usually only human understandable: the mark-up (HTML) only provides ren-
d