The unification type of an equational theory is defined using a preorder on substitutions, called the instantiation preorder, whose scope is either restricted to the variables occurring in the unification problem, or unrestricted such that all variables are considered. It has been known for more than three decades that the unification type of an equational theory may vary, depending on which instantiation preorder is used. More precisely, it was shown in 1991 that the theory ACUI of an associative, commutative, and idempotent binary function symbol with a unit is unitary w.r.t. the restricted instantiation preorder, but not unitary w.r.t. the unrestricted one. In 2016 this result was strengthened by showing that the unrestricted type of this theory also cannot be finitary. Here, we considerably improve on this result by proving that ACUI is infinitary w.r.t. the unrestricted instantiation preorder, thus precluding type zero. We also show that, w.r.t. this preorder, the unification type of ACU (where idempotency is removed from the axioms) and of AC (where additionally the unit is removed) is infinitary, though it is respectively unitary and finitary in the restricted case. In the other direction, we prove (using the example of unification in the description logic EL) that the unification type may actually improve from type zero to infinitary when switching from the restricted instantiation preorder to the unrestricted one. In addition, we establish some general results on the relationship between the two instantiation preorders.

Abstract Unification has been introduced in Description Logic (DL) as a means to detect redundancies in ontologies. In particular, it was shown that testing unifiability in the DL $$\mathcal{E}\mathcal{L}$$ E L is an NP-complete problem, and this result has been extended in several directions. Surprisingly, it turned out that the complexity increases to PSpace if one disallows the use of the top concept in concept descriptions. Motivated by features of the medical ontology SNOMED CT, we extend this result to a setting where the top concept is disallowed, but there is a background ontology consisting of restricted forms of concept and role inclusion axioms. We are able to show that the presence of such axioms does not increase the complexity of unification without top, i.e., testing for unifiability remains a PSpace-complete problem.

In applications of AI systems where exact definitions of the important notions of the application domain are hard to come by, the use of traditional logic-based knowledge representation languages such as Description Logics may lead to very large and unintuitive definitions, and high complexity of reasoning. To overcome this problem, we define new concept constructors that allow us to define concepts in an approximate way. To be more precise, we present a family τEL(m) of extensions of the lightweight Description Logic EL that use threshold constructors for this purpose. To define the semantics of these constructors we employ graded membership functions m, which for each individual in an interpretation and concept yield a number in the interval [0,1] expressing the degree to which the individual belongs to the concept in the interpretation. Threshold concepts C⋈t for ⋈∈{<,≤,>,≥} then collect all the individuals that belong to C with degree ⋈t. The logic τEL(m) extends EL with threshold concepts whose semantics is defined relative to a function m. To construct appropriate graded membership functions, we show how concept measures ∼ (which are graded generalizations of subsumption or equivalence between concepts) can be used to define graded membership functions m∼. Then we introduce a large class of concept measures, called simi-d, for which the logics τEL(m∼) have good algorithmic properties. Basically, we show that reasoning in τEL(m∼) is NP/coNP-complete without TBox, PSpace-complete w.r.t. acyclic TBoxes, and ExpTime-complete w.r.t. general TBoxes. The exception is the instance problem, which is already PSpace-complete without TBox w.r.t. combined complexity. While the upper bounds hold for all elements of simi-d, we could prove some of the hardness results only for a subclass of simi-d. This article considerably improves on and generalizes results we have shown in three previous conference papers and it provides detailed proofs of all our results.

Answering temporal CQs over temporalized Description Logic knowledge bases (TKB) is a main technique to realize ontology-based situation recognition. In case the collected data in such a knowledge base is inaccurate, important query answers can be missed. In this paper we introduce the TKB Alignment problem, which computes a variant of the TKB that minimally changes the TKB, but entails the given temporal CQ and is in that sense (cost-) optimal. We investigate this problem for ALC TKBs and conjunctive queries with LTL operators and devise a solution technique to compute (cost-optimal) alignments of TKBs that extends techniques for the alignment problem for propositional LTL over finite traces.

Metric Temporal Logic (MTL) and Timed Propositional Temporal Logic (TPTL) are quantitative extensions of Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) that are prominent and widely used in the verification of real-timed systems. We study MTL and TPTL as specification languages for one-counter machines. It is known that model checking one-counter machines against formulas of Freeze LTL (FLTL), a strict fragment of TPTL, is undecidable. We prove that in our setting, MTL is strictly less expressive than TPTL, and incomparable in expressiveness to FLTL, so undecidability for MTL is not implied by the result for FLTL. We show, however, that the model-checking problem for MTL is undecidable. We further prove that the satisfiability problem for the unary fragments of TPTL and MTL are undecidable; for TPTL, this even holds for the fragment in which only one register and the finally modality is used. This is opposed to a known decidability result for the satisfiability problem for the same fragment of FLTL.

Matching concept descriptions against concept patterns was introduced as a new inference task in Description Logics two decades ago, motivated by applications in the Classic system. Shortly afterwards, a polynomial-time matching algorithm was developed for the DL FL0. However, this algorithm cannot deal with general TBoxes (i.e., finite sets of general concept inclusions). Here we show that matching in FL0 w.r.t. general TBoxes is in ExpTime, which is the best possible complexity for this problem since already subsumption w.r.t. general TBoxes is ExpTime-hard in FL0. We also show that, w.r.t. a restricted form of TBoxes, the complexity of matching in FL0 can be lowered to PSpace.

In a previous paper, we have introduced an extension of the lightweight Description Logic EL that allows us to define concepts in an approximate way. For this purpose, we have defined a graded membership function deg, which for each individual and concept yields a number in the interval [0, 1] expressing the degree to which the individual belongs to the concept. Threshold concepts C~tfor ~∈{<,≤,>,≥} then collect all the individuals that belong to C with degree ~t. We have then investigated the complexity of reasoning in the Description Logic, which is obtained fromby adding such threshold concepts. In the present paper, we extend these results, which were obtained for reasoning without TBoxes, to the case of reasoning w.r.t. acyclic TBoxes. Surprisingly, this is not as easy as might have been expected. On the one hand, one must be quite careful to define acyclic TBoxes such that they still just introduce abbreviations for complex concepts, and thus can be unfolded. On the other hand, it turns out that, in contrast to the case of EL, adding acyclic TBoxes toincreases the complexity of reasoning by at least on level of the polynomial hierarchy.