Abstract

. Motivated by applications that demand for the adequate representation of part-whole relations, different possibilities of representing transitive relations in terminological knowledge representation systems are investigated. A well-known concept language, ALC, is extended by three different kinds of transitive roles. It turns out that these extensions differ largely in expressiveness and computational complexity, hence this investigation gives insight into the diverse alternatives for the representation of transitive relations such as part-whole relations, family relations or partial orders in general. 1 Introduction Terminological knowledge representation systems (TKR-systems) are powerful means to represent the unambiguous, well-defined terminological knowledge in technical and other domains. Mainly, TKR-systems consist of two parts: A knowledge base, which contains the explicit concept definitions given in a so-called concept language, and an inference engine which is able to inf...

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