Traditionally, description logic has focused on representing and reasoning about classes rather than relations (roles), which has been justified by the deterioration of the computational properties if expressive role inclusions are added. The situation is even worse in the temporalised setting, where monodicity is viewed as an almost necessary condition for decidability. We take a fresh look at the description logic DL-Lite with expressive role inclusions, both with and without a temporal dimension. While we confirm that full Boolean expressive power on roles leads to FO^2-like behaviour in the atemporal case and undecidability in the temporal case, we show that, rather surprisingly, the restriction to Krom and Horn role inclusions leads to much lower complexity in the atemporal case and to decidability (and ExpSpace-completeness) in the temporal case, even if one admits full Booleans on concepts. The latter result is one of very few instances breaking the monodicity barrier in temporal FO. This is also reflected on the data complexity level, where we obtain new rewritability results into FO with relational primitive recursion and FO with unary divisibility predicates.
Primitive recursive algebraic theories and program schemes
