Concept Logics

Concept languages (as used in BACK, KL-ONE, KRYPTON, LOOM) are employed as knowledge representation formalisms in Artificial Intelligence. Their main purpose is to represent the generic concepts and the taxonomical hierarchies of the domain to be modeled. This paper addresses the combination of the fast taxonomical reasoning algorithms (e.g. subsumption, the classifier etc.) that come with these languages and reasoning in first order predicate logic. The interface between these two different modes of reasoning is accomplished by a new rule of inference, called constrained resolution. Correctness, completeness as well as the decidability of the constraints (in a restricted constraint language) are shown.