Extending Description Logics with Uncertainty Reasoning in Possibilistic Logic.pdf

Extending Description Logics with Uncertainty Reasoning in Possibilistic Logic Guilin Qi1, Jeff Z. Pan2, and Qiu Ji1 1 Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe, Germany {gqi,qiji}@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de 2 Department of Computing Science, The University of Aberdeen Aberdeen AB24 3FX jpan@csd.abdn.ac.uk Abstract. Possibilistic logic provides a convenient tool for dealing with inconsistency and handling uncertainty. In this paper, we propose pos- sibilistic description logics as an extension of description logics. We give semantics and syntax of possibilistic description logics. We then define two inference services in possibilistic description logics. Since possibilistic inference suffers from the drowning problem, we consider a drowning-free variant of possibilistic inference, called linear order inference. Finally, we implement the algorithms for inference services in possibilistic descrip- tion logics using KAON2 reasoner. 1 Introduction Dealing with uncertainty in the Semantic Web has been recognized as an im- portant problem in the recent decades. Two important classes of languages for representing uncertainty are probabilistic logic and possibilistic logic. Arguably, another important class of language for representing uncertainty is fuzzy set the- ory or fuzzy logic. Many approaches have been proposed to extend description logics with probabilistic reasoning, such as approaches reported in [12,10]. The work on fuzzy extension of ontology languages has also received a lot of attention (e.g., [18,17]). By contrast, there is relatively few work on combining possibilistic logic and description logic. Possibilistic logic [5] or possibility theory offers a convenient tool for handling uncertain or prioritized formulas and coping with inconsistency. It is very pow- erful to represent partial or incomplete knowledge [4]. There are two different kinds of possibility theory: one is qualitative and the other is quantitative. Qual- itative possibility theory is closely relat