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

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, unrestrict...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: COOPIS
• Authors: Guizhen Yang, Michael Kifer
• Keywords: COOPIS 2002, Frame-based Knowledge Bases, Information System, Nonmonotonic Multiple Inheritance, Semantics