Defeasible RDFS via Rational Closure
This work addresses the need for non-monotonic reasoning in semantic web standards, offering a method that remains syntactically compatible with existing RDFS systems, though it is incremental in nature.
The paper tackles the problem of integrating Rational Closure (RC) into RDFS, a semantic web ontology language, by extending the logic $\rho df$ to defeasible $\rho df_\bot$, which allows stating incompatibility between entities and can be decided in polynomial time.
In the field of non-monotonic logics, the notion of Rational Closure (RC) is acknowledged as a prominent approach. In recent years, RC has gained even more popularity in the context of Description Logics (DLs), the logic underpinning the semantic web standard ontology language OWL 2, whose main ingredients are classes and roles. In this work, we show how to integrate RC within the triple language RDFS, which together with OWL2 are the two major standard semantic web ontology languages. To do so, we start from $ρdf$, which is the logic behind RDFS, and then extend it to $ρdf_\bot$, allowing to state that two entities are incompatible. Eventually, we propose defeasible $ρdf_\bot$ via a typical RC construction. The main features of our approach are: (i) unlike most other approaches that add an extra non-monotone rule layer on top of monotone RDFS, defeasible $ρdf_\bot$ remains syntactically a triple language and is a simple extension of $ρdf_\bot$ by introducing some new predicate symbols with specific semantics. In particular, any RDFS reasoner/store may handle them as ordinary terms if it does not want to take account for the extra semantics of the new predicate symbols; (ii) the defeasible $ρdf_\bot$ entailment decision procedure is build on top of the $ρdf_\bot$ entailment decision procedure, which in turn is an extension of the one for $ρdf$ via some additional inference rules favouring an potential implementation; and (iii) defeasible $ρdf_\bot$ entailment can be decided in polynomial time.