Integrating Description Logics and Action Formalisms: First Results

We propose an action formalism that is based on description logics (DLs) and may be viewed as an instance of the Situation Calculus (SitCalc). In particular, description logic concepts can be used for describing the state of the world, and the preand post-conditions of actions. The main advantage of such a combination is that, on the one hand, the expressive power for describing world states and conditions is higher than in other decidable fragments of the SitCalc, which are usually propositional. On the other hand, in contrast to the full SitCalc, effective reasoning is still possible. In this paper, we perform a detailed investigation of how the choice of the DL influences the complexity of the standard reasoning tasks executability and projection in the corresponding action formalism. We also discuss semantic and computational problems in natural extensions of our framework.