Non-Monotonic Generalisation of an Ontology

Human beings constantly deal with situations where their model of the world does not perfectly correspond to reality. In these cases, exceptions emerge, and so it is necessary to include them in the model and reason with them. If the latter phenomenon has a long history as a research topic in the field of artificial intelligence, the modelling one has received less attention. Therefore, in this paper, we start exploring this new perspective by discussing a non-monotonic generalisation of the ontology of damaged solid physical objects. By non-monotonic generalisation we mean a generalisation of the ontology which allows to represent exceptions. If one aspect of this consists in applying a non-monotonic logic, the other, more original, is how to actually manage the exceptions at the level of the axioms of the ontology. The present work concentrates on this latter aspect. In particular, we define what we mean by non-monotonic generalisation and why the notion of damage is suited for exploring the representation of exceptions. Then we outline the methodology to generalise the ontology of solid physical objects. Since this is intended as a case study which will constitute the first step of a more general line of research, we finally discuss some important future directions.