Ontologies with Python: Programming OWL 2.0 Ontologies with Python and Owlready2

Appendix A: Description logics

Description logics (DL) are a family of logics used by ontologies to formalize knowledge of a domain by describing the different concepts of this domain and the associated semantics. Semantics is expressed using predicates of the first-order logic. In order to keep a decidable system, only a subset of the first-order logic is used. The subset is chosen according to the needs of the field. This is why we speak of “description logics” in the plural, because there are a large number of different logics, depending on the subsets selected: with or without negation, with or without unions, and so on.

The different description logics are named using letters representing the elements of the first-order logic that they authorize. ...