Tractable Reasoning and Conjunctive Query Answering for Defeasible DL-Lite under Rational Closure

This paper presents a novel plug-in architecture for efficient reasoning and conjunctive query answering under Rational Closure (RC) in the DL-Lite family of description logics. It demonstrates that both instance checking and CQ answering can be performed with minimal computational overhead by leveraging existing classical reasoners. This development is significant for practitioners as it enhances the capability of lightweight description logics to handle defeasible knowledge, thereby improving the efficiency of knowledge representation systems.