Concrete Domains Meet Expressive Cardinality Restrictions in Description Logics (Extended Version)

TL;DR

This paper explores the combination of concrete domains and expressive number restrictions in description logics, demonstrating that the resulting logic remains decidable with ExpTime complexity, but certain extensions lead to undecidability.

Contribution

It introduces the combined DL $ ext{ALCOSCC}( ext{D})$, analyzes its reasoning complexity, and identifies which extensions preserve decidability.

Findings

The consistency problem for $ ext{ALCOSCC}( ext{D})$ is ExpTime-complete.

Decidable in exponential time if the constraint satisfaction problem of $ ext{D}$ is also decidable in exponential time.

Many natural extensions, including tighter integration of domains and restrictions, lead to undecidability.

Abstract

Standard Description Logics (DLs) can encode quantitative aspects of an application domain through either number restrictions, which constrain the number of individuals that are in a certain relationship with an individual, or concrete domains, which can be used to assign concrete values to individuals using so-called features. These two mechanisms have been extended towards very expressive DLs, for which reasoning nevertheless remains decidable. Number restrictions have been generalized to more powerful comparisons of sets of role successors in $\mathcal{ALCSCC}$, while the comparison of feature values of different individuals in $\mathcal{ALC}(\mathfrak{D})$ has been studied in the context of $\omega$-admissible concrete domains $\mathfrak{D}$. In this paper, we combine both formalisms and investigate the complexity of reasoning in the thus obtained DL $\mathcal{ALCOSCC}(\mathfrak{D})$, which additionally includes the ability to refer to specific individuals by name. We show that, in spite of its high expressivity, the consistency problem for this DL is ExpTime-complete, assuming that the constraint satisfaction problem of $\mathfrak{D}$ is also decidable in exponential time. It is thus not higher than the complexity of the basic DL $\mathcal{ALC}$. At the same time, we show that many natural extensions to this DL, including a tighter integration of the concrete domain and number restrictions, lead to undecidability.