A New Semantics for Overriding in Description Logics (Extended Abstract)

Piero A. Bonatti, Marco Faella, Iliana M. Petrova, Luigi Sauro

Abstract: Nonmonotonic inferences are not yet supported by Description Logic technology, although their potential usefulness is widely recognized. Lack of support to nonmonotonic reasoning is due to a number of issues related to expressiveness, computational complexity, and optimizations. This work contributes to the practical support of nonmonotonic reasoning in description logics by introducing a new semantics designed to address knowledge engineering needs. The formalism is validated through extensive comparison with the other nonmonotonic DLs, and systematic scalability tests.