| Summary: | The Description Logic EL has recently drawn considerable attention since, on
the one hand, important inference problems such as the subsumption problem are
polynomial. On the other hand, EL is used to define large biomedical
ontologies. Unification in Description Logics has been proposed as a novel
inference service that can, for example, be used to detect redundancies in
ontologies. The main result of this paper is that unification in EL is
decidable. More precisely, EL-unification is NP-complete, and thus has the same
complexity as EL-matching. We also show that, w.r.t. the unification type, EL
is less well-behaved: it is of type zero, which in particular implies that
there are unification problems that have no finite complete set of unifiers.
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