A Faithful Translation from Entity-relationship Schemas to the Description Logic ALENI+

An interesting topic on designing entity relationship (ER) schemas is how to transform ER schemas into knowledge bases (KBs) in description logics (DLs). It is significance in translations that one can use automated DL reasoning services to support the development and maintenance of correct ER schemas. This paper proposed a faithful translation, which translates ER schemas and ER models into KBs in the description logic ALENI+. The faithfulness preserves the satisfiability and the unsatisfiability, and therefore the translation is sound. The translation allows us to reduce reasoning on ER schemas to finite models reasoning on ALENI+ KBs.