Category-theoretical Semantics of the Description Logic ALC (extended version)

14 pagesCategory theory can be used to state formulas in First-Order Logic without using set membership. Several notable results in logic such as proof of the continuum hypothesis can be elegantly rewritten in category theory. We propose in this paper a reformulation of the usual set-theoretical semantics of the description logic ALC by using categorical language. In this setting, ALC concepts are represented as objects, concept subsumptions as arrows, and memberships as logical quantifiers over objects and arrows of categories. Such a category-theore\-tical semantics provides a more modular representation of the semantics of $\mathcal{ALC}$ and a new way to design algorithms for reasoning