Expressiveness of concept expressions in first-order description logics

摘要

We introduce a method for characterizing the expressive power of concept expressions in first-order description logics. The method is essentially model-theoretic in nature in that it gives preservation results uniquely identifying a wide range of description logics as fragments of first-order logic. The languages studied in the paper all belong to the well-known ℱℒ¯ and %plane1D;49C;ℒ hierarchies.