Principles and practice in verifying rule-based systems

1992 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alun D. Preece ◽  
Rajjan Shinghal ◽  
Aïda Batarekh

AbstractThis paper surveys the verification of expert system knowledge bases by detecting anomalies. Such anomalies are highly indicative of errors in the knowledge base. The paper is in two parts. The first part describes four types of anomaly: redundancy, ambivalence, circularity, and deficiency. We consider rule bases which are based on first-order logic, and explain the anomalies in terms of the syntax and semantics of logic. The second part presents a review of five programs which have been built to detect various subsets of the anomalies. The four anomalies provide a framework for comparing the capabilities of the five tools, and we highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. This paper therefore provides not only a set of underlying principles for performing knowledge base verification through anomaly detection, but also a survey of the state-of-the-art in building practical tools for carrying out such verification. The reader of this paper is expected to be familiar with first-order logic.

2010 ◽  
Vol 10 (4-6) ◽  
pp. 547-563 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARTIN SLOTA ◽  
JOÃO LEITE

AbstractThe need for integration of ontologies with nonmonotonic rules has been gaining importance in a number of areas, such as the Semantic Web. A number of researchers addressed this problem by proposing a unified semantics forhybrid knowledge basescomposed of both an ontology (expressed in a fragment of first-order logic) and nonmonotonic rules. These semantics have matured over the years, but only provide solutions for the static case when knowledge does not need to evolve.In this paper we take a first step towards addressing the dynamics of hybrid knowledge bases. We focus on knowledge updates and, considering the state of the art of belief update, ontology update and rule update, we show that current solutions are only partial and difficult to combine. Then we extend the existing work on ABox updates with rules, provide a semantics for such evolving hybrid knowledge bases and study its basic properties.To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that an update operator is proposed for hybrid knowledge bases.


2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-79
Author(s):  
STATHIS DELIVORIAS ◽  
MICHEL LECLÈRE ◽  
MARIE-LAURE MUGNIER ◽  
FEDERICO ULLIANA

AbstractExistential rules are a positive fragment of first-order logic that generalizes function-free Horn rules by allowing existentially quantified variables in rule heads. This family of languages has recently attracted significant interest in the context of ontology-mediated query answering. Forward chaining, also known as the chase, is a fundamental tool for computing universal models of knowledge bases, which consist of existential rules and facts. Several chase variants have been defined, which differ on the way they handle redundancies. A set of existential rules is bounded if it ensures the existence of a bound on the depth of the chase, independently from any set of facts. Deciding if a set of rules is bounded is an undecidable problem for all chase variants. Nevertheless, when computing universal models, knowing that a set of rules is bounded for some chase variant does not help much in practice if the bound remains unknown or even very large. Hence, we investigate the decidability of the k-boundedness problem, which asks whether the depth of the chase for a given set of rules is bounded by an integer k. We identify a general property which, when satisfied by a chase variant, leads to the decidability of k-boundedness. We then show that the main chase variants satisfy this property, namely the oblivious, semi-oblivious (aka Skolem), and restricted chase, as well as their breadth-first versions.


2000 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lei Yan ◽  
K. Krishnamurthy

Abstract Task planning for a robot operating in an unknown environment using first-order logic is considered in this study. The approach is to use one agent to simulate the robot and a second agent to simulate the environment. Both agents employ knowledge bases and an inference engine. The rules for the knowledge bases are developed using first-order logic and the inference method is based on hyper-resolution. A weighting scheme is used by the robot to decide on the action to be taken. After enough domain information is obtained, a task planner, which is also based on rules, is employed. Simulation results validating the methodology are presented for a robot moving inside a warehouse with four rooms. In this example, the environment is initially unknown to the robot. But after mapping the environment, the robot can efficiently plan tasks such as moving an object from one room to another.


2021 ◽  
Vol 168 ◽  
pp. 114167
Author(s):  
Megha Bhushan ◽  
José Ángel Galindo Duarte ◽  
Piyush Samant ◽  
Ashok Kumar ◽  
Arun Negi

2008 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 259-272
Author(s):  
Y. Liu ◽  
G. Lakemeyer

Levesque proposed a generalization of a database called a proper knowledge base (KB), which is equivalent to a possibly infinite consistent set of ground literals. In contrast to databases, proper KBs do not make the closed-world assumption and hence the entailment problem becomes undecidable. Levesque then proposed a limited but efficient inference method V for proper KBs, which is sound and, when the query is in a certain normal form, also logically complete. He conjectured that for every first-order query there is an equivalent one in normal form. In this note, we show that this conjecture is false. In fact, we show that any class of formulas for which V is complete must be strictly less expressive than full first-order logic. Moreover, in the propositional case it is very unlikely that a formula always has a polynomial-size normal form.


2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-38
Author(s):  
Cecilia Reyes Peña ◽  
Mireya Tovar Vidal ◽  
Concepción Stephanie Vázquez González

In this paper, a manual ontology for a Computer Sciences Master program constructed, that uses some elements from the METHONTOLOGY, Grüninger and Fox, and Bravo’s methodologies, is presented. A series of steps to identify and represent the Master’s Degree program’s knowledge base has been followed. Afterwards, first order logic axioms and competency questions to evaluate the ontology are used. The development of a module written in Python language is used for evaluating the ontology through competency questions defined during design phase. This module is flexible enough to present predefined or defined questions by the user in running time and to obtain results to the queries representing the competency questions. Elements as a hierarchy class diagram and a description of the relations and attributes are used in this ontology’s construction. Keywords: Ontology; Python tool; SPARQL language.


Author(s):  
Diego Calvanese ◽  
Julien Corman ◽  
Davide Lanti ◽  
Simon Razniewski

Counting answers to a query is an operation supported by virtually all database management systems. In this paper we focus on counting answers over a Knowledge Base (KB), which may be viewed as a database enriched with background knowledge about the domain under consideration. In particular, we place our work in the context of Ontology-Mediated Query Answering/Ontology-based Data Access (OMQA/OBDA), where the language used for the ontology is a member of the DL-Lite family and the data is a (usually virtual) set of assertions. We study the data complexity of query answering, for different members of the DL-Lite family that include number restrictions, and for variants of conjunctive queries with counting that differ with respect to their shape (connected, branching, rooted). We improve upon existing results by providing PTIME and coNP lower bounds, and upper bounds in PTIME and LOGSPACE. For the LOGSPACE case, we have devised a novel query rewriting technique into first-order logic with counting.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document