Towards Novel Techniques for Reasoning in Expressive Description Logics based on Binary Decision Diagrams

We propose to design and study new techniques for description logic (DL) reasoning based on a prominent data structure that has been applied very successfully in various domains in computer science where one has to face the efficient representation and processing of large scale problems: Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs). BDDs have been used very successfully for reasoning in propositional logics, and have been lifted to the level of first-order logics, too. In both cases, they provide a rich semantic structure to guide proof search. Therefore, we believe that (i) BDDs are interesting to study in the context of reasoning for a logic of intermediate expressivity (such as DLs) and (ii) that they provide a fertile ground for the design of novel efficient methods for reasoning in particular expressive DLs. The project will help to enrich the available machinery of DL reasoning techniques.