---
title: "Conservative Rewritability of Description Logic TBoxes"
authors:
  - "Boris Konev"
  - "Carsten Lutz"
  - "Frank Wolter"
  - "Michael Zakharyaschev"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2016/167"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2016/0167.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2016
pages: "1153-1158"
track: ""
keywords:
---

# Conservative Rewritability of Description Logic TBoxes

Boris Konev, Carsten Lutz, Frank Wolter, Michael Zakharyaschev

*Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 1153-1158.

## Abstract

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.