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Erschienen in:
2009 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel
Unification in the Description Logic
verfasst von : Franz Baader, Barbara Morawska
Erschienen in: Rewriting Techniques and Applications
Verlag: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
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The Description Logic
$\mathcal{EL}$
has recently drawn considerable attention since, on the one hand, important inference problems such as the subsumption problem are polynomial. On the other hand,
$\mathcal{EL}$
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. The main result of this paper is that unification in
$\mathcal{EL}$
is decidable. More precisely,
$\mathcal{EL}$
-unification is NP-complete, and thus has the same complexity as
$\mathcal{EL}$
-matching. We also show that, w.r.t. the unification type,
$\mathcal{EL}$
is less well-behaved: it is of type zero, which in particular implies that there are unification problems that have no finite complete set of unifiers.