Reconciling Description Logics and Rules

Description logics (DLs) and rules are formalisms that emphasize different aspects of knowledge representation: whereas DLs are focused on specifying and reasoning about conceptual knowledge, rules are focused on nonmonotonic inference. Many applications, however, require features of both DLs and rules. Developing a formalism that integrates DLs and rules would be a natural outcome of a large body of research in knowledge representation and reasoning of the last two decades; however, achieving this goal is very challenging and the approaches proposed thus far have not fully reached it. In this paper, we present a hybrid formalism of MKNF+ knowledge bases, which integrates DLs and rules in a coherent semantic framework. Achieving seamless integration is nontrivial, since DLs use an open-world assumption, while the rules are based on a closed-world assumption. We overcome this discrepancy by basing the semantics of our formalism on the logic of minimal knowledge and negation as failure (MKNF) by Lifschitz. We present several algorithms for reasoning with MKNF+ knowledge bases, each suitable to different kinds of rules, and establish tight complexity bounds.