Correspondence:
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Address for correspondence: Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Torino, corso Svizzera 185, 10149 Torino, Italy
Note: [*] This work extends and revises preliminary results described in [1].
Note: [†] Partially supported by the project “AThOS: Accountable Trustworthy Organizations and Systems”, Progetti di Ateneo Università degli Studi di Torino and Compagnia di San Paolo, call 2014, line “Excellent (young) PI”.
Note: [‡] Partially supported by the project “ExceptionOWL: Nonmonotonic Extensions of Description Logics and OWL for defeasible inheritance with exceptions”, Progetti di Ateneo Università degli Studi di Torino and Compagnia di San Paolo,
call 2014, line “Excellent (young) PI”.
Abstract: The paper presents a methodology to revise a Description Logic knowledge base when exceptions are detected. The approach exploits concepts and results from techniques developed for debugging Description Logic terminologies. Debugging an inconsistent terminology amounts to identifying a minimal subset of axioms responsible for the inconsistency (i.e., an error to be removed by a knowledge engineer). Exception handling, instead, requires to revise the axioms causing an inconsistency so that a new consistent knowledge base is obtained, encompassing the detected exception about an individual x. To this aim, we make use of a nonmonotonic extension of the Description Logic 𝒜ℒ𝒞 based on the combination of a typicality operator and the well established nonmonotonic mechanism of rational closure, which allows one to deal with prototypical properties and defeasible inheritance.
