A strengthening of rational closure in DLs: reasoning about multiple aspects

TL;DR

This paper enhances description logics by introducing a method to reason about multiple aspects of typicality, allowing for more nuanced inheritance of properties with exceptions, reflecting human-like reasoning about categories.

Contribution

It extends a basic Description Logic with a typicality operator to reason about different aspects separately, improving the modeling of exceptions in concept inheritance.

Findings

Enables reasoning about multiple aspects of typicality.

Supports exceptions in inheritance for specific properties.

Improves modeling of human-like cognition in ontologies.

Abstract

We propose a logical analysis of the concept of typicality, central in human cognition (Rosch,1978). We start from a previously proposed extension of the basic Description Logic ALC (a computationally tractable fragment of First Order Logic, used to represent concept inclusions and ontologies) with a typicality operator T that allows to consistently represent the attribution to classes of individuals of properties with exceptions (as in the classic example (i) typical birds fly, (ii) penguins are birds but (iii) typical penguins don't fly). We then strengthen this extension in order to separately reason about the typicality with respect to different aspects (e.g., flying, having nice feather: in the previous example, penguins may not inherit the property of flying, for which they are exceptional, but can nonetheless inherit other properties, such as having nice feather).