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Unification in the Description Logic EL

Franz Baader (TU Dresden)

Info

Date

9th June 2011 (week 6, Trinity Term 2011)

Time

15:00

Place

380

Abstract

The Description Logic EL has recently drawn considerable attention since, on the one hand, important inference problems such as the subsumption problem are polynomial. On the other hand, EL is used to define large biomedical ontologies. Unification in Description Logics has been proposed as a novel inference service that can, for example, be used to detect redundancies in ontologies.
In a recent paper, we have shown that unification in EL is decidable. More precisely, EL-unification is NP-complete, and thus has the same complexity as EL-matching. In addition to a "guess and then test" NP-algorithm, we have also developed two more practical algorithms: a goal-oriented, transformation-based algorithm and an algorithm that is based on a translation into SAT.

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