Roughening the EL Envelope

The EL family of description logics (DLs) has been successfully applied for representing the knowledge of several domains, specially from the bio-medical fields. One of its principal characteristics is that its reasoning tasks have polynomial complexity, which makes them suitable for large-scale knowledge bases. In their classical form, description logics cannot handle imprecise concepts in a satisfactory manner. Rough sets have been studied as a method for describing imprecise notions, by providing a lower and an upper approximation, which are defined through classes of indiscernible elements. In this paper we study the combination of the EL family of DLs with the notion of rough sets, thus obtaining a family of rough DLs. We show that the rough extension of these DLs maintains the polynomial-time complexity enjoyed by its classical counterpart. We also present a completionbased algorithm that is a strict generalization of the known method for the DL EL.