Michael Jackson defines a Problem Frame as a mean to describe and classify software development problems. The initial description of problem Frames is essentially graphical. A weakness of this proposal is the lack of formal specification allowing efficient reasoning tools. This paper deals with Problem Frames’ formal specification with Description Logics. We first propose a formal terminology of Problem Frames leading to the specification of a Problem Frames’ TBOX and a specific problem’s ABOX. The Description Logics inference tools can then be used to decompose multi frame problems or to fix a particular problem into a Problem Frame.

This paper deals with an automatic document’s synthesis system. Our approach is based on the prior formal description of the semantics of the main elements (document, reader and his request) in the synthesis system. In this approach, semantic capture is based on ontology definition that is specified formally using Description Logics (DL). The DL inference techniques associated to production rules are then used to compute a document synthesis. Moreover, DL inference techniques are used to reason about each component.