Motivated by the need for semantically well-founded and algorithmically managable formalism that is based on description logics (DLs), but is also firmly grounded on research in the reasoning about action community. Our main contribution is an analysis of how the choice of the DL influences the complexity of standard reasoning tasks such as projection and executability, which are important for Web service discovery and composition.

In the reasoning about actions community, causal relationships have been proposed as a possible approach for solving the ramification problem, i. e., the problem of how to deal with indirect effects of actions. In this paper, we show that causal relationships can be added to action formalisms based on Description Logics without destroying the decidability of the consistency and the projection problem.

Projection is the problem of checking whether the execution of a given sequence of actions will achieve its goal starting from some initial state. In this paper, we study a setting where we combine a two-dimensional Description Logic of context (ConDL) with an action formalism. We choose a well-studied ConDL where both: the possible states of a dynamical system itself (object level) and also different context-dependent views on this system state (context level) are organised in relational structures and can be described using usual DL constructs. To represent how such a system and its views evolve we introduce a suitable action formalism. It allows to describe change on both levels. Furthermore, the observable changes on the object level due to an action execution can also be contextdependent. We show that the formalism is well-behaved in the sense that projection has the same complexity as standard reasoning tasks in case ALCO is the underlying DL.