Editing Description logic (section)

{{short description|Family of formal knowledge representation}}
'''Description logics''' ('''DL''') are a family of formal [[knowledge representation]] languages. Many DLs are more expressive than [[propositional logic]] but less expressive than [[first-order logic]]. In contrast to the latter, the core reasoning problems for DLs are (usually) [[Decidability (logic)|decidable]], and efficient decision procedures have been designed and implemented for these problems. There are general, spatial, temporal, spatiotemporal, and fuzzy description logics, and each description logic features a different balance between [[Expressive power (computer science)|expressive power]] and [[Knowledge representation and reasoning|reasoning]] [[Complexity class|complexity]] by supporting different sets of mathematical constructors.<ref>{{cite book |last=Sikos |first=Leslie F. |date=2017 |title=Description Logics in Multimedia Reasoning |url=https://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319540658 |location=Cham |publisher=Springer International Publishing |isbn=978-3-319-54066-5 |doi=10.1007/978-3-319-54066-5 |s2cid=3180114 }}</ref>

DLs are used in [[artificial intelligence]] to describe and reason about the relevant concepts of an application domain (known as ''terminological knowledge''). It is of particular importance in providing a logical formalism for [[Ontology (information science)|ontologies]] and the [[Semantic Web]]: the [[Web Ontology Language]] (OWL) and its profiles are based on DLs. The most notable application of DLs and OWL is in [[biomedical informatics]] where DL assists in the codification of biomedical knowledge.{{Citation needed|reason=How was this decided? By whom? Need reference to sources which summarize biomedical KBs and also a comparison to other domains which use it, eg military intelligenc, climate modeling|date=June 2022}}