Belief Contraction in Web-Ontology Languages

Marcio Ribeiro (1)
Renata Wassermann (1)
Grigoris Antoniou (2)
Giorgos Flouris (2)
Jeff Pan (3)

1 Department of Computer Science, University of Sao Paulo, BRAZIL
2 Institute of Computer Science, FORTH, GREECE
3 Department of Computing Science, University of Aberdeen, SCOTLAND

marciomr@ime.usp.br
renata@ime.usp.br
antoniou@ics.forth.gr
fgeo@ics.forth.gr
jeff.z.pan@abdn.ac.uk

Abstract
Previous works have shown that the AGM theory cannot be used as the basis 
for defining contraction operators for several ontology representation 
languages. In this paper, we examine the postulate of relevance which has 
been proposed in the belief revision literature as a more intuitive 
alternative to the AGM postulate of recovery. Even though relevance and 
recovery have been proven to be equivalent in the presence of the other 
AGM postulates in classical logics, we show that this is not true for 
non-classical ones. Based on this fact, we are able to show that the 
relevance postulate is a very attractive alternative to recovery for 
ontology evolution, as it can be used to define contraction operators in 
all interesting ontology representation languages.