Access-Limited Logic: A language for knowledge representation
Access-Limited Logic (ALL) is a language for knowledge representation which formalizes the access limitations inherent in a network structured knowledge-base. Where a deductive method such as resolution would retrieve all assertions that satisfy a given pattern, an access-limited logic retrieves all assertions reachable by following an available access path. The time complexity of inference is thus a polynomial function of the size of the accessible portion of the knowledge-base, rather than the size of the entire knowledge-base. Access-Limited Logic, though incomplete, still has a well defined semantics and a weakened form of completeness, Socratic Completeness, which guarantees that for any query which is a logical consequence of the knowledge-base, there exists a series of queries after which the original query will succeed. The author has implemented ALL in Lisp and it has been used to build several non-trivial systems, including versions of Qualitative Process Theory and Pearl's probability networks. ALL is a step toward providing the properties - clean semantics, efficient inference, expressive power - which will be necessary to build large, effective knowledge bases.
- Research Organization:
- Texas Univ., Austin, TX (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 7205549
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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