Unification of Concept Terms (Extended Abstract)

Franz Baader LuFg Theoretical Computer Science, RWTH Aachen Ahornstraße 55, 52074 Aachen, Germany e-mail: baader@informatik.rwth-aachen.de Paliath Narendran y Department of Computer Science State University of New York at Albany Albany, NY 12222, USA e-mail: dran@cs.albany.edu 1 Introduction Knowledge representation languages based on Description Logics (DL languages) can be used to represent the terminological knowledge of an application domain in a structured and formally well-understood way [7, 3]. With the help of these languages, the important notions of the domain can be described by concept terms, i.e., expressions that are built from atomic concepts (unary predicates) and atomic roles (binary predicates) using the concept constructors provided by the DL language. The atomic concepts and concept terms represent sets of individuals, whereas roles represent binary relations between individuals. For example, using the atomic concept Woman and the atomic role child, the concept..