CONSISTENCY OF STRUCTURED KNOWLEDGE - A FORMAL FRAMEWORK BASED ON DESCRIPTION LOGICS

In the general framework of the KBS validation, our work deals with th e consistency checking of the domain knowledge. We have chosen to cope with the problem in a modular way according to the different aspects (deductive, structuring) of the domain knowledge. In this paper, we st udy the consistency of the structuring aspect of the domain knowledge, which corresponds with the links of specialization between the concep ts of the domain. Our approach consists of getting free of the impleme ntation aspects of any specific object-oriented language. For that, we have chosen to specify this structuring aspect in a terminological fo rmalism issued from Description Logics. Such terminological formalisms have emerged from several recent works on Knowledge Representation is sued from the KL-ONE language. They are devoted to formally representi ng information about individual objects, related by binary relationshi ps (called roles) and grouped into concepts, in a syntax associated wi th a formal semantics.