An Introduction to Description Logic

Presenter: Alex Berry, Data Engineer, Indiana University Description Logic provides a formal language for knowledge representation. It is the theoretical base for ontology authoring languages like OWL. They do this by expressing relationships between concepts and individuals in a given domain in a way that can be analyzed by people and algorithms alike. In this talk, I will explain how to read the most commonly used symbols in Description Logic one at a time and then introduce larger expressions. I will go over the core ideas of Description Logic and walk through examples of their usage, including an explanation of a very simple Description Logic called the Attributive Language. After going over Attributive Language, I will cover how extensions to this language add expressivity at the cost of complexity. Finally, I will briefly explain how some of the basics of Description Logic map to OWL to RDF. Presented on 11 October 2024 at the LD4 2024 Conference on Linked Data