12 research outputs found
A Potpourri of Reason Maintenance Methods
We present novel methods to compute changes to materialized
views in logic databases like those used by rule-based reasoners.
Such reasoners have to address the problem of changing axioms in the
presence of materializations of derived atoms. Existing approaches have
drawbacks: some require to generate and evaluate large transformed programs
that are in Datalog - while the source program is in Datalog and
significantly smaller; some recompute the whole extension of a predicate
even if only a small part of this extension is affected by the change.
The methods presented in this article overcome these drawbacks and derive
additional information useful also for explanation, at the price of an
adaptation of the semi-naive forward chaining
A beginner's guide to belief revision and truth maintenance systems
This brief note is intended to familiarize the non-TMS audience with some of the basic ideas surrounding classic TMS's (truth maintenance systems), namely the justification-based TMS and the assumption-based TMS. Topics of further interest include the relation between non-monotonic logics and TMS's, efficiency and search issues, complexity concerns, as well as the variety of TMS systems that have surfaced in the past decade or so. These include probabilistic-based TMS systems, fuzzy TMS systems, tri-valued belief systems, and so on
Reason Maintenance - State of the Art
This paper describes state of the art in reason maintenance with a focus on its future usage in the KiWi project. To give a bigger picture of the field, it also mentions closely related issues such as non-monotonic logic and paraconsistency. The paper is organized as follows: first, two motivating scenarios referring to semantic wikis are presented which are then used to introduce the different reason maintenance techniques
Economic allocation of computation time with computation markets
Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1994.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 88-91).by Nathaniel Rockwood Bogan.M.Eng
Élaboration d'un système de maintien de vérité : une approche orientée objet
Le but de ce mémoire est de présenter une approche orientée objet pour l’élaboration d’un Système de Maintien de Vérité à base de Justifications à Négation et Non Monotone (SMVJNNM). Un SMV est un module utilisé dans les systèmes à base de connaissances pour réviser des croyances. On distingue trois principaux types de SMV: à base de justifications, à base logique et à base d'assomptions. Ils utilisent des structures en réseau pour enregistrer les instances d'un ensemble de règles et tous s'inscrivent dans un paradigme orienté listes. Nous proposons un paradigme objet pour l’élaboration d’un SMV. Les étapes de la démarche suivie sont: étude des SMV existants, modélisation d’un SMV au niveau des connaissances, conception par patrons, implémentation et tests. Deux exemples tirés de la documentation scientifique montrent que notre système offre des fonctionnalités équivalentes à celles des SMV étudiés. Notre système a aussi été utilisé comme mini-moteur de recherche.The objective of this master’s degree dissertation is to propose an object oriented approach for the design of negated non-monotonic justifications-based truth maintenance systems (NNMJTMS). A truth maintenance system (TMS) is a module assisting knowledge-based systems to conduct belief revision. There are three main types of TMS: justification-based, logical-based and assumption-based. All of these systems use network structures to register instances of a set of production rules according to a list-oriented paradigm. We propose in our work to adopt an object-oriented approach for the design of a TMS. We went through the following steps: review of existing TMS, modeling a TMS at the knowledge level, design and implementation using patterns and testing. To test the TMS in conjunction with a client system, two examples borrowed from scientific literature indicate that our system offers functionalities equivalent to those of the TMS found in the literature. In the first example, we validate some textbook cases. And in the second one, we test the load capacity of the TMS system while assisting a tiny search engine
Constructive Reasoning for Semantic Wikis
One of the main design goals of social software, such as wikis, is to
support and facilitate interaction and collaboration. This dissertation
explores challenges that arise from extending social software with
advanced facilities such as reasoning and semantic annotations and
presents tools in form of a conceptual model, structured tags, a rule
language, and a set of novel forward chaining and reason maintenance
methods for processing such rules that help to overcome the
challenges.
Wikis and semantic wikis were usually developed in an ad-hoc
manner, without much thought about the underlying concepts. A conceptual
model suitable for a semantic wiki that takes advanced features
such as annotations and reasoning into account is proposed. Moreover,
so called structured tags are proposed as a semi-formal knowledge
representation step between informal and formal annotations.
The focus of rule languages for the Semantic Web has been predominantly
on expert users and on the interplay of rule languages
and ontologies. KWRL, the KiWi Rule Language, is proposed as a
rule language for a semantic wiki that is easily understandable for
users as it is aware of the conceptual model of a wiki and as it
is inconsistency-tolerant, and that can be efficiently evaluated as it
builds upon Datalog concepts.
The requirement for fast response times of interactive software
translates in our work to bottom-up evaluation (materialization) of
rules (views) ahead of time – that is when rules or data change, not
when they are queried. Materialized views have to be updated when
data or rules change. While incremental view maintenance was intensively
studied in the past and literature on the subject is abundant,
the existing methods have surprisingly many disadvantages – they
do not provide all information desirable for explanation of derived
information, they require evaluation of possibly substantially larger
Datalog programs with negation, they recompute the whole extension
of a predicate even if only a small part of it is affected by a
change, they require adaptation for handling general rule changes.
A particular contribution of this dissertation consists in a set of
forward chaining and reason maintenance methods with a simple declarative
description that are efficient and derive and maintain information
necessary for reason maintenance and explanation. The reasoning
methods and most of the reason maintenance methods are described
in terms of a set of extended immediate consequence operators the
properties of which are proven in the classical logical programming
framework. In contrast to existing methods, the reason maintenance methods in this dissertation work by evaluating the original Datalog
program – they do not introduce negation if it is not present in the input
program – and only the affected part of a predicate’s extension is
recomputed. Moreover, our methods directly handle changes in both
data and rules; a rule change does not need to be handled as a special
case.
A framework of support graphs, a data structure inspired by justification
graphs of classical reason maintenance, is proposed. Support
graphs enable a unified description and a formal comparison of the
various reasoning and reason maintenance methods and define a notion
of a derivation such that the number of derivations of an atom is
always finite even in the recursive Datalog case.
A practical approach to implementing reasoning, reason maintenance,
and explanation in the KiWi semantic platform is also investigated. It
is shown how an implementation may benefit from using a graph
database instead of or along with a relational database
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Transformational maintenance by reuse of design histories
This thesis provides theory and procedures for modifying software artifacts implemented by a formal transformation process. Installing modifications requires knowing not only what transformations were applied (a derivation history) to construct the artifact, but also why the application sequence ensures that the artifact meets its specification. The derivation history and the justification are collectively called a design history. A Design Maintenance System (DMS), when provided with a formal change called a maintenance delta, revises a design history to guide construction of a new artifact. A DMS can be used to integrate a stream of deltas into a history, providing implementations as a side effect, leading to an incremental-evolution model for software construction.We provide a broadly applicable formal model of transformation systems in which specifications are performance predicates, subsuming the functional specifications which are traditional for transformation systems. Such performance predicates provide vocabulary used in the design history to describe the effect of applying sets of transformations.A nonprocedural, performance-goal-oriented Transformation Control Language (TCL) is defined to control navigation of the design space for a transformation system. Recording the execution of a TCL metaprogram directly provides a design history.A complete classification of, and representation for, the set of possible maintenance deltas is given in terms of the inputs defined by the transformation system model. Such deltas include not only specification changes, but also changes to implementation support technologies. Delta integration procedures for revising derivation histories given functional or support technology deltas are provided, based on rearranging the order of transformations in the design space. Building on these operations, integration procedures that revise the design history for each type of delta are described. An agenda-oriented TCL execution process dovetails smoothly with the integration procedures.Our DMS is compared to a number of other maintenance systems. By using an explicit delta and verified commutativity, our DMS often reuses transformations correctly when others fail
A source modelling system and its use for uncertainty management
Human agents have to deal with a considerable amount of information from their environment and are also continuously faced with the need to take actions. As that information is largely of an uncertain nature, human agents have to decide whether, or how much, to believe individual pieces of information. To enable a reasoning system to deal in general with the demands of a real environment, and with information from human sources in particular, requires tools for uncertainty management and belief formation. This thesis presents a model for the management of uncertain information from human sources. Dealing, more specifically, with information which has been pre-processed by a natural language processor and transformed into an event-based representation, the model assesses information, forms beliefs and resolves conflicts between them in order to maintain a consistent world model. The approach is built on the fundamental principle that the uncertainty of information from people can, in the majority of situations, successfully be assessed through source models which record factors concerning the source's abilities and trustworthiness. These models are adjusted to reflect changes in the behaviour of the source. A mechanism is presented together with the underlying principles to reproduce such a behaviour. A high-level design is also given to make the proposed model reconstructible, and the successful operation of the model is demonstrated on two detailed examples