To define the important notions of such an application domain as formal concepts, DLs state necessary and sufficient conditions for an individual to belong to a concept. These conditions can be Boolean combinations of atomic properties required for the individual (expressed by concept names) or properties that refer to relationships with other individuals and their properties (expressed as role restrictions). For example, the concept of a parent that has only daughters can be formalized by the concept description C: child.Human child.Female, which uses the concept names Female and Human and the role name child as well as the concept constructors conjunction (), existential restriction ( r.D), and value restriction ( r.D). Constraints on the interpretation of concept and role names can be formulated as general concept inclusions (GCIs). For example, the GCIs Human child.Human and child.Human Human say that humans have only human children, and they are the only ones that can have human children. DL systems provide their users with reasoning services that allow them to derive implicit knowledge from the explicitly represented one.

Logic-based approaches to AI have the advantage that their behavior can in principle be explained to a user. If, for instance, a Description Logic reasoner derives a consequence that triggers some action of the overall system, then one can explain such an entailment by presenting a proof of the consequence in an appropriate calculus. How comprehensible such a proof is depends not only on the employed calculus, but also on the properties of the particular proof, such as its overall size, its depth, the complexity of the employed sentences and proof steps, etc. For this reason, we want to determine the complexity of generating proofs that are below a certain threshold w.r.t. a given measure of proof quality. Rather than investigating this problem for a fixed proof calculus and a fixed measure, we aim for general results that hold for wide classes of calculi and measures. In previous work, we first restricted the attention to a setting where proof size is used to measure the quality of a proof. We then extended the approach to a more general setting, but important measures such as proof depth were not covered. In the present paper, we provide results for a class of measures called recursive, which yields lower complexities and also encompasses proof depth. In addition, we close some gaps left open in our previous work, thus providing a comprehensive picture of the complexity landscape.

Unification in Description Logics has been introduced as a means to detect redundancies in ontologies. We try to extend the known decidability results for unification in the Description Logic $\mathcal{EL}$ to disunification since negative constraints can be used to avoid unwanted unifiers. While decidability of the solvability of general $\mathcal{EL}$-disunification problems remains an open problem, we obtain NP-completeness results for two interesting special cases: dismatching problems, where one side of each negative constraint must be ground, and local solvability of disunification problems, where we consider only solutions that are constructed from terms occurring in the input problem. More precisely, we first show that dismatching can be reduced to local disunification, and then provide two complementary NP-algorithms for finding local solutions of disunification problems.

Our understanding of the notion "dynamic system" is a rather broad one: such a system has states, which can change over time. Ontologies are used to describe the states of the system, possibly in an incomplete way. Monitoring is then concerned with deciding whether some run of the system or all of its runs satisfy a certain property, which can be expressed by a formula of an appropriate temporal logic. We consider different instances of this broad framework, which can roughly be classified into two cases. In one instance, the system is assumed to be a black box, whose inner working is not known, but whose states can be (partially) observed during a run of the system. In the second instance, one has (partial) knowledge about the inner working of the system, which provides information on which runs of the system are possible. In this paper, we will review some of our recent work that can be seen as instances of this general framework of ontology-based monitoring of dynamic systems. We will also mention possible extensions towards probabilistic reasoning and the integration of mathematical modeling of dynamical systems.