Similarity-based relaxed instance queries

In Description Logics (DL) knowledge bases (KBs), information is typically captured by clear-cut concepts. For many practical applications querying the KB by crisp concepts is too restrictive; a user might be willing to lose some precision in the query, in exchange of a larger selection of answers. Similarity measures can offer a controlled way of gradually relaxing a query concept within a user-specified limit. In this paper we formalize the task of instance query answering for DL KBs using concepts relaxed by concept similarity measures (CSMs). We investigate computation algorithms for this task in the DL EL, their complexity and properties for the CSMs employed regarding whether unfoldable or general TBoxes are used. For the case of general TBoxes we define a family of CSMs that take the full TBox information into account, when assessing the similarity of concepts.