DLML | Operators | Logics | Transformations | Transformation flow

Description Logic Markup Language

DLML is not a language but rather a system of DTDs that allows to encode many (if not all) description logics in the same framework. So far, it is restricted to TBox encoding.

What is DLML?

Motivation

One important motivation to build DTDs for description languages is to be able to embed formal knowledge (in DL) in documents (see the pages of the ESCRIRE action for more information).

Other motivations include the experiment of simple representation language transformations for which description logics are well-suited.

Introductory example

The goal of DLML is to encode description logics expressions into XML. For instance, the sentence "All CSmaster students are bachelor students whose advisor is computer scientist" is phrased in description logics by the expression:

CSMasterStudents < (and Bachelor Student (all advisor ComputerScientist)) In this example, CSMasterStudent, Bachelor and Student are called concepts and advisor is called a role. The sentence above is a concept introduction for the concept CSMasterStudents. It is primitive because introduced by the < symbol. This means that if all the CSmaster students are bachelor students whose advisor is computer scientist, the reverse is not supposed to hold. The symbols and and all are called (concept) constructors and used for building complex concept descriptions.

This expression will be straigthforwardly encoded in XML by just marking all the elements described above:

<TERMINOLOGY> <CPRIM> <CATOM>CSMasterStudent</CATOM> <AND> <CATOM>Bachelor</CATOM> <CATOM>Student</CATOM> <ALL> <RATOM>advisor</RATOM> <CATOM>ComputerScientist</CATOM> </ALL> </AND> </CPRIM> </TERMINOLOGY> This form of the terminology can be embedded into any kind of XML document while preserving its structure. Moreover, it will be possible to manipulate it as is shown below.

Organisation

The DLML takes advantage of the modularity of description logics in which each operator and introducer can be described independently and a logic assemble these operators. The resources available here are thus:

The encoding of many operators,
The definition of logics, and
The illustration of many transformations, including some taking advantage of the semantics of the logic.

Sample XML files

simple-sample.xml: The very simple sample (FL-);
modern-team.xml: The modern-team example of [Nebel 1990] (FLN);
complete.xml: All these examples in one file (U).

Future developments

Some developments are currently taking place:

The full semantics description of the logics provided by DLML (this can be used, for instance, in order to check that a particular transformation is valid).
A stylesheet for transfoming a logic specification (by providuing its constructors and introducers) into complete DTD and DSD for that logic.

References

Francesco Donini, Maurizio Lenzerini, Daniele Nardi, Andrea Schaerf, Reasoning in description logics, in: Gerd Brewka (ed.), Principles of knowledge representation, CSLI lecture note ?, pp191-236, 1996.

Bernhard Nebel, Reasoning and revision in hybrid representation systems, Lecture notes in computer science 422, 1990.

Peter Patel-Schneider, Bill Swartout (eds.), Description logic knowledge representation system specification, 1993.

DLML | Operators | Logics | Transformations | Transformation flow

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