The Downgrading Axioms Challenge for Qualitative Composition of Food Ingredients

Qualitatively graded relations provide increased granularity for fine-grain modelling, and achieve qualitative abstraction from quantitative data. We focus on composite dosage for food ingredients in the BAALL Ontology (of considerable size): weight ratios, Alcohol By Volume, etc. To deduce the overall qualitative composition by reasoning, axioms for downgrading are introduced. These impose a heavy load on reasoning such that conventional reasoners fail.