Fiorela Ciroku

• Belief revision is the subarea of knowledge representation which studies the dynamics of epistemic states of an agent. In the classical AGM approach, contraction, as part of the belief revision, deals with the removal of beliefs in knowledge bases. This master's thesis presents the study and the implementation of concept contraction in the Description Logic EL. Concept contraction deals with the following situation. Given two concept C and D, assuming that C is subsumed by D, how can concept C be changed so that it is not subsumed by D anymore, but is as similar as possible to C? This approach of belief change is different from other related work because it deals with contraction in the level of concepts and not T-Boxes and A-Boxes in general. The main contribution of the thesis is the implementation of the concept contraction. The implementation provides insight into the complexity of contraction in EL, which is tractable since the main inference task in EL is also tractable. The implementation consists of the design of five algorithms that are necessary for concept contraction. The algorithms are described, illustrated with examples, and analyzed in terms of time complexity. Furthermore, we propose an new approach for a selection function, adapt for the concept contraction. The selection function uses metadata about the concepts in order to select the best from an input set. The metadata is modeled in a framework that we have designed, based on standard metadata frameworks. As an important part of the concept contraction, the selection function is responsible for selecting the best concepts that are as similar as possible to concept C. Lastly, we have successfully implemented the concept contraction in Python, and the results are promising.