A Defeasible Logic Reasoner for the Semantic Web

Abstract

Defeasible reasoning is a rule-based approach for efficient reasoning with incomplete and inconsistent information. Such reasoning is, among others, useful for ontology integration, where conflicting information arises naturally; and for the modeling of business rules and policies, where rules with exceptions are often used. This paper describes these scenarios and reports on the implementation of a system for defeasible reasoning on the Web. The system, DR-DEVICE, is capable of reasoning about RDF metadata over multiple Web sources using defeasible logic rules. It is implemented on top of CLIPS production rule system and builds upon R-DEVICE, an earlier deductive rule system over RDF metadata that also supports derived attribute and aggregate attribute rules. Rules can be expressed either in a native CLIPS-like language, or in an extension of the OO-RuleML syntax. The operational semantics of defeasible logic are implemented through compilation into the generic rule language of R-DEVICE. The paper also presents a full semantic Web broker example for apartment renting.