Computing the least common subsumer w . r . t . a background

Methods for computing the least common subsumer (lcs) are usually restricted to rather inexpressive Description Logics (DLs) whereas existing knowledge bases are written in very expressive DLs. In order to allow the user to re-use concepts defined in such terminologies and still support the definition of new concepts by computing the lcs, we extend the notion of the lcs of concept descriptions to the notion of the lcs w.r.t. a background terminology. We will show both theoretical results on the existence of the least common subsumer in this setting, and describe a practical approach—based on a method from formal concept analysis—for computing good common subsumers, which may, however, not be the least ones. We will also describe results obtained in a first evaluation of this practical approach. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.