Ontology Reasoning and Evolution with Inconsistency Tolerance: An Argumentative Approach to Revision of Description Logics

Abstract

Reasoning and change over inconsistent ontologies (i-ont(s)) is of utmost relevance in sciences like medicine and law. Argumentation may be an appropriate formalism to cope with both problems: (reasoning) through an argumentation framework (AF) constructed from the i-ont, and (change) by handling the dynamics of its arguments. We propose a new family of abstract AFs referred as generalized (GenAF), due to its ability of adapting to different representation languages. Afterwards, we propose a possible instantiation of the GenAF?s abstract language for arguments to the basic ALC description logic for reasoning over i-onts. For dynamics of arguments, a revision operation modifies the graph of arguments in an AF for provoking the argumentation semantics to accept an argument. Thus, revising an ALC-GenAF would introduce a novel methodology for handling evolution of i-onts. To such end, we propose a revision operation by relying upon classic belief revision theory, although contrary to it, consistency restoration is avoided in order to handle evolution with inconsistency tolerance.