Knowledge Base Revision in Description Logics

Ontology evolution is an important problem in the Semantic Web research. Recently, Alchourrón, Gärdenfors and Markinson’s (AGM) theory on belief change has been applied to deal with this problem. However, most of current work only focuses on the feasibility of the application of AGM postulates on contraction to description logics (DLs), a family of ontology languages. So the explicit construction of a revision operator is ignored. In this paper, we first generalize the AGM postulates on revision to DLs. We then define two revision operators in DLs. One is the weakening-based revision operator which is defined by weakening of statements in a DL knowledge base and the other is its refinement. We show that both operators capture some notions of minimal change and satisfy the generalized AGM postulates for revision.