Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

6-1-2008

Abstract

The Web Ontology Language (OWL) adheres to the openworld assumption and can thus not be used for forms of nonmonotonic reasoning or defeasible inference, an acknowledged desirable feature in open Semantic Web environments. We investigate the use of the formalism of circumscriptive description logics (DLs) to realise defeasible inference within the OWL framework. By example, we demonstrate how reasoning with (restricted) circumscribed OWL ontologies facilitates various forms of defeasible inference, also in comparison to alternative approaches. Moreover, we sketch an extension to DL tableaux for handling the circumscriptive case and report on a preliminary implementation.

Comments

Presented at the Workshop on Advancing Reasoning on the Web: Scalability and Commonsense at the 5th European Semantic Web Conference, Tenerife, Spain, June 1-5, 2008.


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