Reasoning about exceptions in ontologies: from the lexicographic closure to the skeptical closure
This work addresses a challenge in description logics for ontology reasoning, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing rational closure methods.
The paper tackles the problem of handling exceptions in ontologies by proposing a variant of the lexicographic closure called skeptical closure, which constructs a single base to allow independent inheritance of defeasible properties, though no concrete numerical results are provided.
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 variant of the lexicographical closure, that we call skeptical closure, which requires to construct a single base. We develop a bi-preference semantics semantics for defining a characterization of the skeptical closure.