A Case for Embedded Natural Logic for Ontological Knowledge Bases

We argue in favour of adopting a form of natural logic for ontology-structured knowledge bases as an alternative to description logic and rule based languages. Natural logic is a form of logic resembling natural language assertions, unlike description logic. This is essential e.g. in life sciences, where the large and evolving knowledge specifications should be directly accessible to domain experts. Moreover, natural logic comes with intuitive inference rules. The considered version of natural logic leans toward the closed world assumption (CWA) unlike the open world assumption with classical negation in description logic. We embed the natural logic in DATALOG clauses which is to take care of the computational inference in connection with querying.