On the Scalability of Description Logic Instance Retrieval: Extended Abstract

Although description logic systems can adequately be used for representing and reasoning about underspecified information (e.g., for John we know he is French or Italian), in practical applications it can be assumed that (only) for some tasks the expressivity of description logics really comes into play whereas for building complete applications, it is often necessary to effectively solve instance retrieval problems with respect to largely deterministic knowledge (instance retrieval scalability problem). In this paper we present and analyze the main results we have found about how to contribute to the scalability problem. We assume familiarity with description logics in general and tableau provers in particular.