A Terminological Approach to Resource Discovery Mechanisms

Resource Discovery Mechanisms are commonly used to publish and retrieve information about network-available resources. Description Logics are basically a subset of Predicate Logic where expressiveness and computational complexity have been deeply studied. In this paper we present a formal approach to these mechanisms using Description Logics. This is based on a terminological model of the RDM (Resource Description Messages) mechanism. We provide a translation of the resource description schemas and basic query languages of RDM. This translation allows us to beneet from the inference capabilities of terminological systems without losing the information contained in RDM messages.