ER Model Transformation Using Conceptual Modelling With Description Logic

Abstract

Description logic (DL) is a language for knowledge representation which is used to represent the terminological knowledge of an application domain in a structured and well-understood way. Two important features of DL are expressivity and decidability. Description Logics use two types of data structures for representing knowledge viz T-Box and A-Box. T-Box stores the basic terminologies of the application domain whereas A-Box consists of the assertions resulted from inference. Description Logics use two types of inference patterns: classification of individuals and classification of concepts. The process of inference is called as Reasoning. There are several types of reasoning. The reasoning procedures used in DL are Decision Procedures. The purpose of this paper is to understand the basic issues involved in conceptual modeling using DLs. We briefly review the basics of DL along with its architecture, syntax and semantics of DL. Then we will see how we can model a real world application using DL at conceptual level.