On the semantics of theory change: arbitration between old and new information

  • Authors:
  • Peter Z. Revesz

  • Affiliations:
  • Univ. of Nebraska, Lincoln

  • Venue:
  • PODS '93 Proceedings of the twelfth ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART symposium on Principles of database systems
  • Year:
  • 1993

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Katsuno and Mendelzon divide theory change, the problem of adding new information to a logical theory, into two types: revision and update. We propose a third type of theory change: arbitration. The key idea is the following: the new information is considered neither better nor worse than the old information represented by the logical theory. The new information is simply one voice against a set of others already incorporated into the logical theory. From this follows that arbitration should be commutative. First we define arbitration by a set of postulates and then describe a model-theoretic characterization of arbitration for the case of propositional logical theories. We also study weighted arbitration where different models of a theory can have different weights.