Answering Instance Queries Relaxed by Concept Similarity

In Description Logic (DL) knowledge bases (KBs) information is typically captured by crisp concepts. For many applications, querying the KB by crisp query concepts is too restrictive. A controlled way of gradually relaxing a query concept can be achieved by the use of concept similarity measures. In this paper we formalize the task of instance query answering for crisp DL KBs using concepts relaxed by concept similarity measures. We investigate computation algorithms for this task in the DL EL, their complexity and properties for the employed similarity measure regarding whether unfoldable or general TBoxes are used.