Characterizing the semantics of terminological cycles with the help of finite automata

The representation of terminological knowledge may naturally lead to terminological cycles. In addition to descriptive semantics, the meaning of cyclic terminologies can also be captured by xed-point semantics. To gain a more profound understanding of these semantics and to obtain inference algorithms for inconsistency, subsumption , and related inference tasks, this paper provides automata theoretic characterizations of these semantics. The already existing results for the language FL 0 are extended to ALN, which additionally allows for primitive negation and number-restrictions. Moreover, this work considers the relationship between certain schemas and ALN-terminologies.