Terminological Cycles in KL-ONE-based Knowledge Representation Languages

Cyclic definitions are often prohibited in terminological knowledge representation languages because, from a theoretical point of view, their semantics is not clear and, from a practical point of view, existing inference algorithms may go astray in the presence of cycles. In this paper, we shall consider terminological cycles in a very small KL-ONE-based language. For this language, the effect of the three types of semantics introduced by (Nebel 1987,1989,1989a) can be completely described with the help of finite automata. These descriptions provide a rather intuitive understanding of terminologies with cyclic definitions and give insight into the essential features of the respective semantics. In addition, one obtains algorithms and complexity results for subsumption determination. As it stands, the greatest fixed-point semantics comes off best. The characterization of this semantics is easy and has an obvious intuitive interpretation. Furthermore, important constructs - such as valu...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1990
• Where: AAAI
• Authors: Franz Baader
• Keywords: AAAI 1990, Cyclic Definitions, Intelligent Agents, Semantics, Terminological Knowledge Representation