A defeasible description logic for representing bibliographic data

Abstract

In this chapter, we make a first step toward developing a defeasible description logic system that can represent a flexible publication ontology which can support intelligent queries. It involves using the description logic system ALC to build the ontology. We extend an ALC knowledge base with defeasible rules to yield a defeasible description logic system called Def-ALC. Def-ALC will be useful to users of a digital library and will be flexible and decidable. We shall show that a superiority relation between rules gives us a ranking of the rules which could be beneficial as it can be adjusted to meet the needs of various users and user groups. A prototype of a publication ontology is developed and implemented using Def-ALC.