A fuzzy description logic

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Description Logics (DLs, for short) allow reasoning about individuals and concepts, i.e. set of individuals with common properties. Typically, DLs are limited to dealing with crisp, well defined concepts. That is, concepts for which the problem whether an individual is an instance of it is a yes/no question. More often than not, the concepts encountered in the real world do not have a precisely defined criteria of membership: we may say that an individual is an instance of a concept only to a certain degree, depending on the individual's properties. Concepts of this kind are rather vague than precise. As fuzzy logic directly deals with the notion of vagueness and imprecision, it offers an appealing foundation for a generalisation of DLs to vague concepts. In this paper we present a general fuzzy DL, which combines fuzzy logic with DLs. We define its syntax, semantics and present constraint propagation calculi for reasoning in it.