Rational Closure in SHIQ

Abstract: We define a notion of rational closure for the logic SHIQ, which does not enjoys the finite model property, building on the notion of rational closure introduced by Lehmann and Magidor in [23]. We provide a semantic characterization of rational closure in SHIQ in terms of a preferential semantics, based on a finite rank characterization of minimal models. We show that the rational closure of a TBox can be computed in EXPTIME using entailment in SHIQ.