Towards Higher-Order DL-Lite

In several application domains, the need arises of modeling and reasoning about meta-concepts and meta-properties. This is the case, for example, with information system interoperability, where a description of the data schema (or, the ontology) of one system should co-exist with the specification of the application domain described by the data schema itself. In logic, higher-order constructs are needed for a correct representation of concepts and properties at the meta-level. Current research on Description Logics mainly focuses on their ability for specifying the domain of interest, while the issue of devising suitable extensions to these logics for representing and reasoning about meta-level elements is largely unexplored. In this paper, we present the first results of our investigation on extending DL-Lite with higher-order capabilities. We show that basic higherorder constructs can be safely added to DL-lite while keeping all the reasoning tasks tractable, including answering conjunctive queries mixing object-level and meta-level elements.