Recent papers address the issue of updating the instance level of knowledge
bases expressed in Description Logic following a model-based approach. One of
the outcomes of these papers is that the result of updating a knowledge base K
is generally not expressible in the Description Logic used to express K. In
this paper we introduce a formula-based approach to this problem, by revisiting
some research work on formula-based updates developed in the '80s, in
particular the WIDTIO (When In Doubt, Throw It Out) approach. We show that our
operator enjoys desirable properties, including that both insertions and
deletions according to such operator can be expressed in the DL used for the
original KB. Also, we present polynomial time algorithms for the evolution of
the instance level knowledge bases expressed in the most expressive Description
Logics of the DL-lite family
