Handling irresolvable conflicts in the Semantic Web: an RDF-based conflict-tolerant version of the Deontic Traditional Scheme

TL;DR

This paper introduces an RDF-based ontology for the Semantic Web that handles irresolvable conflicts in deontic logic, enabling reasoning about conflicting obligations, prohibitions, and permissions in a unified framework.

Contribution

It presents the first comprehensive RDF and SPARQL implementation of the Deontic Traditional Scheme capable of managing irresolvable conflicts and various deontic modalities.

Findings

Framework formalizes all deontic modalities in RDF

Handles irresolvable conflicts and violations

Includes Java implementation and examples

Abstract

This paper presents a new ontology that implements the well-known Deontic Traditional Scheme in RDFs and SPARQL, fit to handle irresolvable conflicts, i.e., situations in which two or more statements prescribe conflicting obligations, prohibitions, or permissions, with none of them being "stronger" than the other one(s). In our view, this paper marks a significant advancement in standard theoretical research in formal Deontic Logic. Most contemporary approaches in this field are confined to the propositional level, mainly focus on the notion of obligation, and lack implementations. The proposed framework is encoded in RDF, which is not only a first-order language but also the most widely used knowledge representation language, as it forms the foundation of the Semantic Web. Moreover, the proposed computational ontology formalizes all deontic modalities defined in the Deontic Traditional Scheme, without specifically focusing on obligations, and offers constructs to model and reason with various types of irresolvable conflicts, violations, and the interaction between deontic modalities and contextual constraints in a given state of affairs. To the best of our knowledge, no existing approach in the literature addresses all these aspects within a unified integrated framework. All examples presented and discussed in this paper, together with Java code and clear instructions to re-execute them locally, are available at https://github.com/liviorobaldo/conflict-tolerantDeonticTraditionalScheme