An Entailment Relation for Reasoning on the Web

Reasoning on the Web is receiving an increasing attention because of emerging fields such as Web adaption and Semantic Web. Indeed, the advanced functionalities striven for in these fields call for reasoning capabilities. Reasoning on the Web, however, is usually done using existing techniques rarely fitting the Web. As a consequence, additional data processing like data conversion from Web formats (e.g. XML or HTML) into some other formats (e.g. classical logic terms and formulas) is often needed and aspects of the Web (e.g. its inherent inconsistency) are neglected. This article first gives requirements for an entailment tuned to reasoning on the Web. Then, it describes how classical logic’s entailment can be modified so as to enforce these requirements. Finally, it discusses how the proposed entailment can be used in applying logic programming to reasoning on the Web.