The loop formula based semantics of description logic programs (Q764312)

This paper discusses the semantics of so-called description logic programs. These are linguistic tools, defined by Thomas Eiter and his co-authors, obtained by integrating a rather classical logic programming setting with a description logics stratum. This integration is conceived as to well serve the purpose of providing deductive capabilities to description logic based ontologies. The theme the paper deals with is a relevant one in as much as formalisms like dl-programs will supposedly play a crucial role in the definition of the Web x.0 to come. This paper, in particular, first shows the interesting result that answer sets of dl-programs strictly correspond to models of their completion and loop formulas (similar results holding for classical logic programs). Then, the paper proposes an alternative semantics for dl-programs, called canonical answer set semantics, and discusses some interesting formal properties of it, including a comparison to FLP-semantics. The paper is technically quite dense but the results are adequately introduced and commented. Overall, an interesting article to read for researchers interested in the general area of the semantic Web and, more specifically, in logic programming based approaches to this realm.