The notion of forgetting, also known as variable elimination, has been investigated extensively in the context of classical logic, but less so in (nonmonotonic) logic programming and nonmonotonic reasoning. The few approaches that exist are based on syntactic modifications of a program at hand. In this paper, we establish a declarative theory of forgetting for disjunctive logic programs under answer set semantics that is fully based on semantic grounds. The suitability of this theory is justified by a number of desirable properties. In particular, one of our results shows that our notion of forgetting can be entirely captured by classical forgetting. We present several algorithms for computing a representation of the result of forgetting, and provide a characterization of the computational complexity of reasoning from a logic program under forgetting. As applications of our approach, we present a fairly general framework for resolving conflicts in inconsistent knowledge bases that are represented by disjunctive logic programs, and we show how the semantics of inheritance logic programs and update logic programs from the literature can be characterized through forgetting. The basic idea of the conflict resolution framework is to weaken the preferences of each agent by forgetting certain knowledge that causes inconsistency. In particular, we show how to use the notion of forgetting to provide an elegant solution for preference elicitation in disjunctive logic programming.

No abstract

In recent years, there has been a large amount of disparate work concerning the representation and reasoning with qualitative preferential information by means of approaches to nonmonotonic reasoning. Given the variety of underlying systems, assumptions, motivations, and intuitions, it is difficult to compare or relate one approach with another. Here, we present an overview and classification for approaches to dealing with preference. A set of criteria for classifying approaches is given, followed by a set of desiderata that an approach might be expected to satisfy. A comprehensive set of approaches is subsequently given and classified with respect to these sets of underlying principles.

No abstract

To support the reuse and combination of ontologies in Semantic Web applications, it is often necessary to obtain smaller ontologies from existing larger ontologies. In particular, applications may require the omission of certain terms, e. g., concept names and role names, from an ontology. However, the task of omitting terms from an ontology is challenging because the omission of some terms may affect the relationships between the remaining terms in complex ways. We present the first solution to the problem of omitting concepts and roles from knowledge bases of description logics (DLs) by adapting the technique of forgetting, previously used in other domains. Specifically, we first introduce a model-theoretic definition of forgetting for knowledge bases (both TBoxes and ABoxes) in DL-Lite N bool , which is a non-trivial adaption of the standard definition for classical logic, and show that our model-based forgetting satisfies all major criteria of a rational forgetting operator, which in turn verifies the suitability of our model-based forgetting. We then introduce algorithms that implement forgetting operations in DL-Lite knowledge bases. We prove that the algorithms are correct with respect to the semantic definition of forgetting. We establish a general framework for defining and comparing different definitions of forgetting by introducing a parameterized family of forgetting operators called query-based forgetting operators. In this framework we identify three specific query-based forgetting operators and show that they form a hierarchy. In particular, we show that the model-based forgetting coincides with one of these query-based forgetting operators.