Reasoning about exceptions in ontologies: from the lexicographic closure to the skeptical closure

Reasoning about exceptions in ontologies is nowadays one of the challenges the description logics community is facing. The paper describes a preferential approach for dealing with exceptions in Description Logics, based on the rational closure. The rational closure has the merit of providing a simple and efficient approach for reasoning with exceptions, but it does not allow independent handling of the inheritance of different defeasible properties of concepts. In this work we outline a possible solution to this problem by introducing a variant of the lexicographical closure, that we call skeptical closure, which requires to construct a single base. We develop a bi-preference semantics semantics for defining a characterization of the skeptical closure

A reconstruction of the multipreference closure

The paper describes a preferential approach for dealing with exceptions in KLM preferential logics, based on the rational closure. It is well known that the rational closure does not allow an independent handling of the inheritance of different defeasible properties of concepts. Several solutions have been proposed to face this problem and the lexicographic closure is the most notable one. In this work, we consider an alternative closure construction, called the Multi Preference closure (MP-closure), that has been first considered for reasoning with exceptions in DLs. Here, we reconstruct the notion of MP-closure in the propositional case and we show that it is a natural variant of Lehmann's lexicographic closure. Abandoning Maximal Entropy (an alternative route already considered but not explored by Lehmann) leads to a construction which exploits a different lexicographic ordering w.r.t. the lexicographic closure, and determines a preferential consequence relation rather than a rational consequence relation. We show that, building on the MP-closure semantics, rationality can be recovered, at least from the semantic point of view, resulting in a rational consequence relation which is stronger than the rational closure, but incomparable with the lexicographic closure. We also show that the MP-closure is stronger than the Relevant Closure.Comment: 57 page

Optimizing the computation of overriding

We introduce optimization techniques for reasoning in DLN---a recently introduced family of nonmonotonic description logics whose characterizing features appear well-suited to model the applicative examples naturally arising in biomedical domains and semantic web access control policies. Such optimizations are validated experimentally on large KBs with more than 30K axioms. Speedups exceed 1 order of magnitude. For the first time, response times compatible with real-time reasoning are obtained with nonmonotonic KBs of this size

Defeasible Reasoning in SROEL: from Rational Entailment to Rational Closure

In this work we study a rational extension $SROEL^R T$ of the low complexity description logic SROEL, which underlies the OWL EL ontology language. The extension involves a typicality operator T, whose semantics is based on Lehmann and Magidor's ranked models and allows for the definition of defeasible inclusions. We consider both rational entailment and minimal entailment. We show that deciding instance checking under minimal entailment is in general $\Pi^P_2$-hard, while, under rational entailment, instance checking can be computed in polynomial time. We develop a Datalog calculus for instance checking under rational entailment and exploit it, with stratified negation, for computing the rational closure of simple KBs in polynomial time.Comment: Accepted for publication on Fundamenta Informatica

A strengthening of rational closure in DLs: reasoning about multiple aspects

We propose a logical analysis of the concept of typicality, central in human cognition (Rosch,1978). We start from a previously proposed extension of the basic Description Logic ALC (a computationally tractable fragment of First Order Logic, used to represent concept inclusions and ontologies) with a typicality operator T that allows to consistently represent the attribution to classes of individuals of properties with exceptions (as in the classic example (i) typical birds fly, (ii) penguins are birds but (iii) typical penguins don't fly). We then strengthen this extension in order to separately reason about the typicality with respect to different aspects (e.g., flying, having nice feather: in the previous example, penguins may not inherit the property of flying, for which they are exceptional, but can nonetheless inherit other properties, such as having nice feather)

A Description Logic Framework for Commonsense Conceptual Combination Integrating Typicality, Probabilities and Cognitive Heuristics

We propose a nonmonotonic Description Logic of typicality able to account for the phenomenon of concept combination of prototypical concepts. The proposed logic relies on the logic of typicality ALC TR, whose semantics is based on the notion of rational closure, as well as on the distributed semantics of probabilistic Description Logics, and is equipped with a cognitive heuristic used by humans for concept composition. We first extend the logic of typicality ALC TR by typicality inclusions whose intuitive meaning is that "there is probability p about the fact that typical Cs are Ds". As in the distributed semantics, we define different scenarios containing only some typicality inclusions, each one having a suitable probability. We then focus on those scenarios whose probabilities belong to a given and fixed range, and we exploit such scenarios in order to ascribe typical properties to a concept C obtained as the combination of two prototypical concepts. We also show that reasoning in the proposed Description Logic is EXPTIME-complete as for the underlying ALC.Comment: 39 pages, 3 figure