Description logics over lattices with multi-valued ontologies

Abstract

Uncertainty is unavoidable when modeling most application domains. In medicine, for example, symptoms (such as pain, dizziness, or nausea) are always subjective, and hence imprecise and incomparable. Additionally, concepts and their relationships may be inexpressible in a crisp, clear-cut manner. We extend the description logic ALC with multi-valued semantics based on lattices that can handle uncertainty on concepts as well as on the axioms of the ontology. We introduce reasoning methods for this logic w.r.t. general concept inclusions and show that the complexity of reasoning is not increased by this new semantics.