Abstract. In this paper, we present an argumentation-based approach to dealing with inconsistency occurring in knowledge bases. We investigate several important logical properties of such an argumentation-based entailment relation and show its promising advantages in paraconsistent reasoning for inconsistent knowledge bases. Moreover, two basic inference problems, namely, satisfiability of concepts and query entailment, are discussed under our semantics. We provide a workable example in order to show the justifiability of the argumentation-based semantics.