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Reconciling description logics and rules

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Semantic Web languages (RDF, RDFS, and OWL) are all grounded in first-order logic and thus inherit its fundamental limitations. For example, these languages do not support commonly needed nonmonotonic features such as negation as failure or default reasoning, so the problem of extending Semantic Web languages with nonmonotonic features has thus received considerable attention in the literature. This paper presents a very general theoretical framework for such an integration that generalises many of the existing proposals in the literature. Furthermore, the paper also presents an in-depth study of the computational properties of reasoning in the framework.

This 62-page journal paper builds on preliminary work published in a 6-page conference paper (IJCAI 2007) submitted to RAE 2008. The journal paper generalises and extends the work in several directions, and adds an extensive survey of existing work. The generalised framework is shown to capture a much wider range of existing formalisms, giving rise to numerous new proofs and complexity results.