Combining knowledge representation and reasoning formalisms is an important and challenging task. It is important because non-trivial AI applications often comprise different aspects of the world, thus requiring suitable combinations of available formalisms modeling each of these aspects. It is challenging because the computational behavior of the resulting hybrids is often much worse than the behavior of their components. In this paper, we propose a new combination method which is computationally robust in the sense that the combination of decidable formalisms is again decidable, and which, nonetheless, allows non-trivial interactions between the combined components. The new method, called E-connection, is defined in terms of abstract description systems (ADSs), a common generalization of description logics, many logics of time and space, as well as modal and epistemic logics. The basic idea of E-connections is that the interpretation domains of n combined systems are disjoint, and that these domains are connected by means of n-ary ‘link relations. ’ We define several natural variants of E-connections and study in-depth the transfer of decidability from the component systems to their E-connections. Key words: description logics, temporal logics, spatial logics, combining logics, decidability.

Recently, a hierarchy of spatio-temporal languages based on the propositional temporal logic PTL and the spatial languages RCC-8, BRCC-8 and S4u has been introduced. Although a number of results on their computational properties were obtained, the most important questions were left open.

Abstract. We investigate the computational complexity of reasoning over various fragments of the Extended Entity-Relationship (EER) language, which includes a number of constructs: ISA between entities and relationships, disjointness and covering of entities and relationships, cardinality constraints for entities in relationships and their refinements as well as multiplicity constraints for attributes. We extend the known EXPTIME-completeness result for UML class diagrams [5] and show that reasoning over EER diagrams with ISA between relationships is EXPTIME-complete even without relationship covering. Surprisingly, reasoning becomes NP-complete when we drop ISA between relationships (while still allowing all types of constraints on entities). If we further omit disjointness and covering over entities, reasoning becomes polynomial. Our lower complexity bound results are proved by direct reductions, while the upper bounds follow from the correspondences with expressive variants of the description logic DL-Lite, which we establish in this paper. These correspondences also show the usefulness of DL-Lite as a language for reasoning over conceptual models and ontologies.

In this paper we study the expressive power and definability for (extended) modal languages interpreted on topological spaces. We provide topological analogues of the van Benthem characterization theorem and the Goldblatt-Thomason definability theorem in terms of the well established first-order topological language Lt.

Abstract. We propose a logic for reasoning about metric spaces with the induced topologies. It combines the ‘qualitative ’ interior and closure operators with ‘quantitative’ operators ‘somewhere in the sphere of radius r, ’ including or excluding the boundary. We supply the logic with both the intended metric space semantics and a natural relational semantics, and show that the latter (i) provides finite partial representations of (in general) infinite metric models and (ii) reduces the standard ‘ε-definitions ’ of closure and interior to simple constraints on relations. These features of the relational semantics suggest a finite axiomatisation of the logic and provide means to prove its EXPTIME-completeness (even if the rational numerical parameters are coded in binary). An extension with metric variables satisfying linear rational (in)equalities is proved to be decidable as well. Our logic can be regarded as a ‘well-behaved ’ common denominator of logical systems constructed in temporal, spatial, and similarity-based quantitative and qualitative representation and reasoning. Interpreted on the real line (with its Euclidean metric), it is a natural fragment of decidable temporal logics for specification and verification of real-time systems. On the real plane, it is closely related to quantitative and qualitative formalisms for spatial

Previous results for combining decision procedures for the word problem in the non-disjoint case do not apply to equational theories induced by modal logics---whose combination is not disjoint since they share the theory of Boolean algebras. Conversely, decidability results for the fusion of modal logics are strongly tailored towards the special theories at hand, and thus do not generalize to other equational theories.

This chapter is about decidability and complexity issues in modal logic; more specifically, we confine ourselves to satisfiability (and the complementary validity) problems. The satisfiability problem is the following: for a fixed class of

this paper. each frame of the class.) For example, K is the logic of all n-ary product frames. It is not hard to see that S5 is the logic of all n-ary products of universal frames having the same worlds, that is, frames hU; R i i with R i = U U . We refer to product frames of this kind as cubic universal product S5 -frames. Note that the `i-reduct' F U 1 U n ; R i of F 1 F n is a union of n disjoint copies of F i . Thus, F and F i validate the same formulas, and so L n L 1 L n : There is a strong interaction between the modal operators of product logics. Every n-ary product frame satis es the following two properties, for each pair i 6= j, i; j = 1; : : : ; n: Commutativity : 8x8y8z xR i y ^ yR j z ! 9u (xR j u ^ uR i z) ^ xR j y ^ yR i z ! 9u (xR i u ^ uR j z) Church{Rosser property : 8x8y8z xR i y ^ xR j z ! 9u (yR j u ^ zR i u) This means that the corresponding modal interaction formulas 2 i 2 j p $ 2 j 2 i p and 3 i 2 j p ! 2 j 3 i p belong to every n-dimensional product logic. The geometrically intuitive many-dimensional structure of product frames makes them a perfect tool for constructing formalisms suitable for, say, spatio-temporal representation and reasoning (see e.g. [33, 34]) or reasoning about the behaviour of multi-agent systems (see e.g. [4]). However, the price we have to pay for the use of products is an extremely high computational complexity|even the product of two NP-complete logics can be non-recursively enumerable (see e.g. [29, 27]). In higher dimensions practically all products of `standard' modal logics are undecidable and non- nitely axiomatisable [16]

Abstract. SCAN is an algorithm for reducing monadic existential second-order logic formulae to equivalent simpler formulae, often first-order logic formulae. It is provably impossible for such a reduction to first-order logic to be always successful, even if there is an equivalent first-order formula for a second-order logic formula. In this paper we show that SCAN successfully computes the first-order equivalents of all Sahlqvist formulae in the classical (multi-)modal language. 1

Abstract. A set theoretical assertion ψ is forceable or possible, written ♦ ψ, if ψ holds in some forcing extension, and necessary, written � ψ, ifψ holds in all forcing extensions. In this forcing interpretation of modal logic, we establish that if ZFC is consistent, then the ZFC-provable principles of forcing are exactly those in the modal theory S4.2. 1.