Belief Revision, Minimal Change and Relaxation: A General Framework
  based on Satisfaction Systems, and Applications to Description Logics
  Belief revision of knowledge bases represented by a set of sentences in a
given logic has been extensively studied but for specific logics, mainly
propositional, and also recently Horn and description logics. Here, we propose
to generalize this operation from a model-theoretic point of view, by defining
revision in an abstract model theory known under the name of satisfaction
systems. In this framework, we generalize to any satisfaction systems the
characterization of the well known AGM postulates given by Katsuno and
Mendelzon for propositional logic in terms of minimal change among
interpretations. Moreover, we study how to define revision, satisfying the AGM
postulates, from relaxation notions that have been first introduced in
description logics to define dissimilarity measures between concepts, and the
consequence of which is to relax the set of models of the old belief until it
becomes consistent with the new pieces of knowledge. We show how the proposed
general framework can be instantiated in different logics such as
propositional, first-order, description and Horn logics. In particular for
description logics, we introduce several concrete relaxation operators tailored
for the description logic $\ALC{}$ and its fragments $\EL{}$ and $\ELext{}$,
discuss their properties and provide some illustrative examples.
