Towards a Paradoxical Description Logic for the Semantic Web

Abstract

As a vision for the future of the Web, the Semantic Web is an open, constantly changing and collaborative environment. Hence it is reasonable to expect that knowledge sources in the Semantic Web contain noise and inaccuracies. However, as the logical foundation of Ontology Web Language in the Semantic Web, description logics fail to tolerate inconsistent information. The study of inconsistency handling in description logics is an important issue in the Semantic Web. One major approach to inconsistency handling is based on so-called paraconsistent reasoning, in which standard semantics is refined so that inconsistencies can be tolerated. Four-valued description logics are not satisfactory for the Semantic Web in that its reasoning is a bit far from standard semantics. In this paper, we present a paraconsistent description logic called paradoxical description logic, which is based on a three-valued semantics. Compared to existing paraconsistent description logics, our approach is more suitable for dealing with inconsistent ontologies in that paraconsistent reasoning under our semantics provides a better approximation to the standard reasoning. An important result in this paper is that we propose a sound and complete tableau for paradoxical description logics.