Reference: Borgida, A. Towards the Systematic Development of Terminological Reasoners: CLASP reconstructed. 1992.
Abstract: Description Logics (DLs) form the basis of several knowledge base management systems developed in recent years, and are beginning to see practical use. The need to extend the expressive power of DLs and customize the inferences drawn by them is motivated, among others, by (i) the desire to facilitate the implementation of domain-specific extensions, such as ones dealing with time or plans; (ii) the goal of offering a new approach to the problem caused by the expressiveness vs. computational cost stand-off: start with a limited language and extend it when its boundaries impinge, but to do so in a possibly application-dependent way, so the incompleteness is comprehensible and tailored to the specific circumstances. We claim that two recently developed tools - natural semantics and the ProtoDL customizable KMBS - can be used in a straightforward and systematic manner to specify and implement extensions of a base DL, while obtaining efficient implementations. We support this claim by reconstructing, and in fact improving, the CLASP description logic, dealing with actions and plans, proposed by Devanbu and Litman.