How to Agree to Disagree

Abstract

AbstractThe 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 proposeStandpoint 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 conflictingstandpoints, which can be hierarchically organised, combined, and put in relation with each other.Starting from the generic framework ofFirst-Order Standpoint Logic(FOSL), we subsequently focus our attention on the fragment ofsententialformulas, 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$$\mathcal {SROIQ}b_s$$SROIQbsunderlying 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.