Reasoning about Exceptions in Ontologies: from the Lexicographic Closure to the Skeptical Closure

Abstract

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 weaker variant of the lexicographical closure, that we call skeptical closure, which requires to construct a single base. We develop a bi-preference semantics for defining a characterization of the skeptical closure.