In this document we provide a structured overview of formalism for the rep-
resentation of ontologies developed in Logic and Artificial Intelligence, and survey
the state of the art in methods and techniques for automated reasoning studied in
Computational Logic. Since a more general overview of such formalisms has already
been reported as part of the deliverable D01 “State of the art survey”, here we con-
centrate on a wide family of logics, called Description Logics (DLs). DLs have been
developed over the years in Artificial Intelligence and Computational Logic to rep-
resent formally knowledge about a domain of interest in terms of objects grouped
into classes and relationships between classes. Such formalisms have been often
advocated as the formal foundation of ontologies. Indeed current ontology language
standards such as RDF/RDFS and especially OWL are based on such formalisms.
In this document, we review DLs from several points of view, laying the foundation
of the research that will be developed within the TONES Project.