Contrastive Reasoning for the Semantic Web

The sentences “but” are used frequently in natural languages. However, the semantics of “but” has not yet been well studied in logic and reasoning. Contrastive reasoning is the reasoning with contrasts which are expressed as contrary conjunctions like the word ”but” in natural language. Contrastive answers are more informative for reasoning with inconsistent ontologies, as compared with the usual simple Boolean answer, i.e., either ”yes” or ”no”. In this paper, we propose a general framework of contrastive reasoning, and a method of computing contrastive answers from inconsistent ontologies. The proposed approach has been implemented in the system CRION (Contrastive Reasoning with Inconsistent ONtologies) as a reasoning plug-in in the LarKC platform, a platform for scalable semantic data processing. We report several experiments in which we apply the CRION system to some realistic ontologies. The evaluation of CRION shows that contrastive reasoning is a useful extension to the existing approaches of reasoning with inconsistent ontologies. This paper is an extension version of the [12]. Jun Fang School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical University, China. E-mail: [email protected] Zhisheng Huang Department of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands E-mail: [email protected] Frank van Harmelen Department of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands E-mail: [email protected]