Pseudo-contractions as Gentle Repairs

Updating a knowledge base to remove an unwanted consequence is a challenging task. Some of the original sentences must be either deleted or weakened in such a way that the sentence to be removed is no longer entailed by the resulting set. On the other hand, it is desirable that the existing knowledge be preserved as much as possible, minimising the loss of information. Several approaches to this problem can be found in the literature. In particular, when the knowledge is represented by an ontology, two different families of frameworks have been developed in the literature in the past decades with numerous ideas in common but with little interaction between the communities: applications of AGM-like Belief Change and justification-based Ontology Repair. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between pseudo-contraction operations and gentle repairs. Both aim to avoid the complete deletion of sentences when replacing them with weaker versions is enough to prevent the entailment of the unwanted formula. We show the correspondence between concepts on both sides and investigate under which conditions they are equivalent. Furthermore, we propose a unified notation for the two approaches, which might contribute to the integration of the two areas

On rational entailment for Propositional Typicality Logic

Description Logics (DLs) under Rational Closure (RC) is a well-known framework for non-monotonic reasoning in DLs. In this paper, we address the concept subsumption decision problem under RC for nominal safe ELO⊥, a notable and practically important DL representative of the OWL 2 profile OWL 2 EL. Our contribution here is to define a polynomial time subsumption procedure for nominal safe ELO⊥ under RC that relies entirely on a series of classical, monotonic EL⊥ subsumption tests. Therefore, any existing classical monotonic EL⊥ reasoner can be used as a black box to implement our method. We then also adapt the method to one of the known extensions of RC for DLs, namely Defeasible Inheritance-based DLs without losing the computational tractability

A connection method for a defeasible extension of ALCH\mathcal{ALCH}

This paper proposes a connection method \`a la Bibel for an exception-tolerant family of description logics (DLs). As for the language, we assume the DL $\mathcal{ALCH}$ extended with two typicality operators: one on (complex) concepts and one on role names. The language is a variant of defeasible DLs, as broadly studied in the literature over the past decade, in which most of these can be embedded. We revisit the definition of the matrix representation of a knowledge base and establish the conditions for a given axiom to be provable. We show that the calculus terminates and is sound and complete w.r.t. a DL version of the preferential semantics widely adopted in non-monotonic reasoning