DR-Prolog: A System for Defeasible Reasoning with Rules and Ontologies on the Semantic Web

Abstract

Nonmonotonic rule systems are expected to play an important role in the layered development of the semantic Web. Defeasible reasoning is a direction in nonmonotonic reasoning that is based on the use of rules that may be defeated by other rules. It is a simple, but often more efficient approach than other nonmonotonic rule systems for reasoning with incomplete and inconsistent information. This paper reports on the implementation of a system for defeasible reasoning on the Web. The system 1) is syntactically compatible with RuleML, 2) features strict and defeasible rules, priorities, and two kinds of negation, 3) is based on a translation to logic programming with declarative semantics, 4) is flexible and adaptable to different intuitions within defeasible reasoning, and 5) can reason with rules, RDF, RDF Schema, and (parts of) OWL ontologies