Rational elimination of DL-Lite TBox axioms

Abstract. An essential task in managing description logic (DL) ontologies is the elimination of problematic axioms. Such elimination is formalised as the opera-tion of contraction in belief change. In this paper, we investigate contraction over DL-LiteR TBoxes. In belief change, a well known approach for defining contrac-tion is via epistemic entrenchments which are preference orderings over formulas. The approach however is not applicable in DL-LiteR as classic belief change as-sumes an underlying logic that is different from DL-LiteR. Thus we reformulate the epistemic entrenchment approach to make it applicable to DL-LiteR. We then provide instantiation for the reformulated approach.