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This paper surveys the temporal extensions of description logics appearearing in the literature. The analysis considers a large spectrum of approaches appearearing in the temporal description logics area: from the loosely coupled approaches – which comprise, for example, the enhancement of simple description logics with a constraint based mechanism – to the most principled ones – which consider a combined semantics for the abstract and the temporal domains. It will be shown how these latter approaches have a strict connection with temporal logics.

Advantages of using temporal description logics are their high expressivity combined with desirable computational properties – such as decidability, soundness and completeness of deduction procedures. In this survey the computational properties of various families of temporal description logics will be pointed out.