Some Classical Problems of Inheritance Networks in the Light of Defeasible Ontology Reasoning

Abstract. Reasoning with possibly inconsistent ontologies is an impor-tant reasearch topic for the implementation of the Semantic Web as they pose a problem for performing instance checking. We contend that De-feasible Logic Programming (DeLP) is a reliable tool for doing ontology reasoning when Description Logic ontologies can be interpreted as DeLP programs. In this work we present some classical problems of the field of inheritance networks and show how they are modeled as inconsistent ontologies and thus how the problem of instance checking is solved; we also show how issues in reasoning with argumentation frameworks based on Dung’s grounded semantics are also solved when applied to ontology reasoning, and we revise the main algorithm for instance checking when using DeLP with inconsistent ontologies.