Reasoning with inconsistent ontologies through argumentation

Abstract

Standard approaches to reasoning with description logics (DL) ontologies require them to be consistent. However, as ontologies are complex entities and sometimes built upon other imported ontologies, inconsistencies can arise. In this article, we present -ontologies, a framework for reasoning with inconsistent DL ontologies. Our proposal involves expressing DL ontologies as defeasible logic programs (DeLP). Given a query posed w.r.t. an inconsistent ontology, a dialectical analysis will be performed on a DeLP program obtained from such an ontology, where all arguments in favor and against the final answer of the query will be taken into account. We also present an application to ontology integration based on the global-as-view approach.