Well-Founded Optimism: Inheritance in Frame-Based Knowledge Bases

  • Authors:

  • Guizhen Yang;Michael Kifer

  • Affiliations:

  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems, 2002 - DOA/CoopIS/ODBASE 2002 Confederated International Conferences DOA, CoopIS and ODBASE 2002
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

F-logic is a popular formalism for knowledge-intensive applications and, especially, for ontology management in Semantic Web. However, the original F-logic's semantics for inheritance suffers from a number of anomalies when inheritance and deduction closely interact.This work rectifies this problem and develops a natural model-theoretic semantics for inheritance in frame-based knowledge bases, which supports inference by inheritance as well as inference via rules. Inference by inheritance supports a multitude of features, such as overriding and nonmonotonic multiple inheritance, meta programming, and dynamic inheritance hierarchies -- the features that are fundamental to advanced knowledge management. This semantics has been effectively implemented in the Flora-2 system which is extensively used in a number of projects.To the best of our knowledge, this work is the only model-theoretic semantics for nonmonotonic multiple inheritance that applies to general, unrestricted frame-based knowledge bases and has several independent characterizations, which testifies to its naturalness and robustness.The problems discussed in this paper are inherent in any logic-based system that supports inheritance and deductive rules and our techniques apply to such systems. In particular, they apply to DAML+OIL extended with rules and inheritance.