Development of a Logic Layer in the Semantic Web: Research Issues

The ontology layer of the semantic web is now mature enough (i.e. standards like RDF, RDFs, OWL, OWL 2) and the next step is to work on a logic layer for the development of advanced reasoning capabilities for knowledge extraction and efficient decision making. Adding logic to the web means using rules to make inferences. Rules are a means of expressing business processes, policies, contracts etc but most of the studies have focused on the use of monotonic logics in layered development of the semantic web which provides no mechanism for representing or handling incomplete or contradictory information respectively. This paper discusses argumentation, semantic web and defeasible logic programming with their distinct features and identifies the different research issues that need to be addressed in order to realize defeasible argumentative reasoning in the semantic web applications.