A terminological default logic.
Associazione italiana per l'intelligenza artificiale,
4(4):22--36, 1991.
Abstract:
Terminological Logics are knowledge representation formalisms of enormous
applicative interest, as they are specifically oriented to the vast class of application
domains that are describable by means of taxonomic organizations of complex objects.
Although the field of terminological logics has lately been an active area of investigation,
few researchers (if any) have addressed the problem of extending these logics with
the ability to perform default reasoning, an important form of non-monotonic
reasoning. Such extensions would prove of paramount applicative value, as for many
application domains a monotonic formalization may be accomplished only at the price
of oversimplification. In this paper we show how we can effectively integrate terminological
reasoning and default reasoning, yielding a terminological default logic.
The kind of default reasoning we embed in our terminological logic is based on Reiter's
Default Logic, but overcomes some of its drawbacks by subscribing to the implicit
handling of exceptions typical of Touretzky's Multiple Inheritance Hierarchies with
Exceptions.