How to Agree to Disagree: Managing Ontological Perspectives using Standpoint Logic

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Contributors

Abstract

The importance of taking individual, potentially conflicting perspectives into account when dealing with knowledge has been widely recognised. Many existing ontology management approaches fully merge knowledge perspectives, which may require weakening in order to maintain consistency; others represent the distinct views in an entirely detached way. As an alternative, we propose Standpoint Logic, a simple, yet versatile multi-modal logic “add-on” for existing KR languages intended for the integrated representation of domain knowledge relative to diverse, possibly conflicting standpoints, which can be hierarchically organised, combined, and put in relation with each other. Starting from the generic framework of First-Order Standpoint Logic (FOSL), we subsequently focus our attention on the fragment of sentential formulas, for which we provide a polytime translation into the standpoint-free version. This result yields decidability and favourable complexities for a variety of highly expressive decidable fragments of first-order logic. Using some elaborate encoding tricks, we then establish a similar translation for the very expressive description logic SROIQbs underlying the OWL 2 DL ontology language. By virtue of this result, existing highly optimised OWL reasoners can be used to provide practical reasoning support for ontology languages extended by standpoint modelling.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe Semantic Web – ISWC 2022
EditorsUlrike Sattler, Aidan Hogan, Maria Keet, Valentina Presutti, João Paulo A. Almeida, Hideaki Takeda, Pierre Monnin, Giuseppe Pirrò, Claudia d’Amato
Pages125–141
Number of pages17
ISBN (electronic)978-3-031-19433-7
Publication statusPublished - 1 Oct 2022
Peer-reviewedYes

Publication series

SeriesLecture Notes in Computer Science
Volume13489
ISSN0302-9743

External IDs

Scopus 85141675806

Keywords

Keywords

  • conflict management, knowledge integration, ontology alignment