Concept Dissimilarity with Triangle Inequality

Several researchers have developed properties that ensure compatibility of a concept similarity or dissimilarity measure with the formal semantics of Description Logics. While these authors have highlighted the relevance of the triangle inequality, none of their proposed dissimilarity measures satisfy it. In this work we present a theoretical framework for dissimilarity measures with this property. Our approach is based on concept relaxations, operators that perform stepwise generalizations on concepts. We prove that from any relaxation we can derive a dissimilarity measure that satisfies a number or properties that are important when comparing concepts.