Conservative Rewritability of Description Logic TBoxes / 1153
Boris Konev, Carsten Lutz, Frank Wolter, Michael Zakharyaschev

We investigate the problem of conservative rewritability of a TBox T in a description logic L into a TBox T' in a weaker description logic L'. We focus on model-conservative rewritability (T' entails T and all models of T are expandable to models of T'), subsumption-conservative rewritability (T' entails T and all subsumptions in the signature of T entailed by T' are entailed by T), and standard description logics between ALC and ALCQI. We give model-theoretic characterizations of conservative rewritability via bisimulations, inverse p-morphisms and generated subinterpretations, and use them to obtain a few rewriting algorithms and complexity results for deciding rewritability.

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