On the Semantics of Defeasible Reasoning for Description Logic Ontologies

Research in nonmonotonic reasoning for description logics to handle incomplete knowledge on the Semantic Web has attracted much attention in recent years. Among proposed approaches, preferential description logic has a well-formed semantics while defeasible reasoning shows its efficiency in the propositional case. In this paper, we propose a method to define formal definition of semantics of defeasible reasoning for description logic based on the framework of preferential DL. The semantics of defeasible DL theory is defined via its simulated theory constructed by two proposed transformations. This proposal fills the gap between these two approaches and may achieve great benefit by utilizing the advantages of both approaches.