Similarity-based Relaxed Instance Queries in EL++

ABSTRACT. Description Logic (DL) knowledge bases (KBs) allow to express knowledge about concepts and individuals in a formal way. This knowledge is typically crisp, i.e., an individual either is an instance of a given concept or it is not. However, in practice this is often too restrictive: when querying for instances, one may often also want to find suitable alternatives, i.e., individuals that are not instances of the query concept, but could still be considered `good enough'. Relaxed instance queries have been introduced to gradually relax this inference in a controlled way via the use of concept similarity measures (CSMs). So far, those algorithms only work for the DL EL, which has limited expressive power. In this paper, we introduce a suitable CSM for EL++-concepts. EL++ adds nominals, role inclusion axioms, and concrete domains to EL. We extend the algorithm to compute relaxed instance queries w.r.t. this new CSM, and thus to work for general EL++ KBs.