Tractable Reasoning and Conjunctive Query Answering for Defeasible DL-Lite under Rational Closure
It provides a practical method for non-monotonic reasoning in lightweight description logics, enabling efficient defeasible query answering for ontology-based data access applications.
The paper studies Rational Closure (RC) for defeasible DL-Lite logics, showing that instance checking and conjunctive query answering under RC can be efficiently implemented via a plug-in architecture over classical reasoners with minimal overhead.
In Description Logics (DLs), reasoning under Rational Closure (RC) is a well-known and widely accepted non-monotonic formalism to handle defeasible knowledge. In this paper, we study the application of RC to the core and horn variants of the DL-Lite family of lightweight description logics. We analyze both entitlement (instance checking) and Conjunctive Query (CQ) answering under RC. Our main contribution is providing a plug-in architecture that builds upon existing standard classical reasoners, establishing that reasoning and CQ answering under RC for DL-Lite can be done efficiently with minimal computational overhead.