Reasoning in the Defeasible Description Logic —computing standard inferences under rational and relevant semantics

Abstract

Defeasible Description Logics (DDLs) extend Description Logics with defeasible concept inclusions. Reasoning in DDLs often employs rational closure according to the (propositional) KLM postulates. A well-known approach to lift this closure to DDLs is by so-called materialisation. Previously investigated algorithms for materialisation-based reasoning employ reductions to classical reasoning using all Boolean connectors. As a first result in this paper, we present a materialisation-based algorithm for the sub-Boolean DDL ▪, using a reduction to reasoning in classical ▪, rendering materialisation-based defeasible reasoning tractable.The main contribution of this article is a kind of canonical model construction, which can be used to decide defeasible subsumption and instance queries in ▪ under rational and the stronger relevant entailment. Our so-called typicality models can reproduce the entailments obtained from materialisation-based rational and relevant closure and, more importantly, obtain stronger versions of rational and relevant entailment. These do not suffer from neglecting defeasible information for concepts appearing nested inside quantifications, which all materialisation-based approaches do. We also show the computational complexity of defeasible subsumption and instance checking in our stronger rational and relevant semantics.