Abstract
Defeasible inheritance networks are a nonmonotonic framework that deals with hierarchical knowledge. On the other hand, rational closure is acknowledged as a landmark of the preferential approach. We will combine these two approaches and de?ne a new non-monotonic closure operation for propositional knowledge bases that combines the advantages of both. Then we rede?ne such a procedure for Description Logics, a family of logics well-suited to model structured information. In both cases we will provide a simple reasoning method that is build on top of the classical entailment relation.