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This paper gives a survey of description logics that is very readable to database researchers. (I tried reading a bunch of other description logic papers, with far less success.) Database researchers with an interest in conceptual modeling should read this paper. Quite a few ideas that have been proposed in the AI community are presented here; many of these ideas are not covered by database texts, and are hence probably underappreciated in the database community.
Among the ideas described in this paper are: conciseness of language idioms, subsumption testing (i.e., query containment), tradeoffs of expressive power with complexity, and the use of automatically derived hierarchies for new concepts (views).
Copyright © 2000 by the author(s). Review published with permission.