---
title: "Most Specific Generalizations w.r.t. General EL-TBoxes"
authors:
  - "Benjamin Zarrieß"
  - "Anni-Yasmin Turhan"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2013/179"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2013/0179.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Twenty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2013
pages: "1191-1196"
track: ""
keywords:
---

# Most Specific Generalizations w.r.t. General EL-TBoxes

Benjamin Zarrieß, Anni-Yasmin Turhan

*Proceedings of the Twenty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 1191-1196.

## Abstract

In the area of Description Logics the least common subsumer (lcs) and the most specific concept (msc) are inferences that generalize a set of concepts or an individual, respectively, into a single concept. If computed w.r.t. a general EL-TBox neither the lcs nor the msc need to exist. So far in this setting no exact conditions for the existence of lcs- or msc-concepts are known. This paper provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of these two kinds of concepts. For the lcs of a fixed number of concepts and the msc we show decidability of the existence in PTime and polynomial bounds on the maximal role-depth of the lcs- and msc-concepts. This bound allows to compute the lcs and the msc, respectively.