A Scheme for Integrating Concrete Domains

A drawback which concept languages based on kl-one have is that all the termino-logical knowledge has to be deened on an abstract logical level. In many applications, one would like to be able to refer to concrete domains and predicates on these domains when deening concepts. Examples for such concrete domains are the integers, the real numbers, or also non-arithmetic domains, and predicates could be equality, inequality, or more complex predicates. In the present paper we shall propose a scheme for integrating such concrete domains into concept languages rather than describing a particular extension by some speciic concrete domain. We shall deene a terminological and an assertional language, and consider the important inference problems such as subsumption, instantiation, and consistency. The formal semantics as well as the reasoning algorithms are given on the scheme level. In contrast to existing kl-one based systems, these algorithms will be not only sound but also complete. They generate subtasks which have to be solved by a special purpose reasoner of the concrete domain.