Enhancing context knowledge repositories with justifiable exceptions

Dealing with context dependent knowledge is a well-known area of study that roots in John McCarthy’s seminal work. More recently, the Contextualized Knowledge Repository (CKR) framework has been conceived as a logic-based approach in which knowledge bases have a two layered structure, modeled by a global context and a set of local contexts. The global context not only contains the meta-knowledge defining the properties of local contexts, but also holds the global (context independent) object knowledge that is shared by all of the local contexts. In many practical cases, however, it is desirable to leave the possibility to “override” the global object knowledge at the local level: in other words, it is interesting to recognize the pieces of knowledge that can admit exceptional instances in the local contexts that do not need to satisfy the general axiom. To address this need, we present in this paper an extension of CKR in which defeasible axioms can be included in the global context. The latter are verified in the local contexts only for the instances for which no exception to overriding exists, where exceptions require a justification in terms of facts that are provable from the knowledge base. We formally define this semantics and study some semantic and computational properties, where we characterize the complexity of the major reasoning tasks, among them satisfiability testing, instance checking, and conjunctive query answering. Furthermore, we present a translation of extended CKRs with knowledge bases in the Description Logic SROIQ-RL under the novel semantics to datalog programs under the stable model (answer set) semantics. We also present an implementation prototype and examine its scalability with respect to the size of the input CKR and the amount (level) of defeasibility in experiments. Finally, we compare our representation approach with some major formalisms for expressing defeasible knowledge in Description Logics and contextual knowledge representation. Our work adds to the body of results on using deductive database technology such as SQL and datalog in these areas, and provides an expressive formalism (in terms of intrinsic complexity) for exception handling by overriding.