The vision of a Semantic Web has recently drawn considerable attention, both from academia and industry. Description Logics are often named as one of the tools that can support the Semantic Web and thus help to make this vision reality. In this paper, we sketch what Description Logics are and what they can do for the Semantic Web. Descriptions Logics are very useful for defining, integrating, and maintaining ontologies, which provide the Semantic Web with a common understanding of the basic semantic concepts used to annotate Web pages. We also argue that, without the last decade of basic research in this area, Description Logics could not play such an important r^ole in this domain. The Semantic Web and Ontologies For many people, the World Wide Web has become an indispensable means of providing and searching for information. Searching the Web in its current form is, however, often an infuriating experience since today's search engines usually provide a huge number of answers, ma...