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A local handling of inconsistent knowledge and default bases

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Applications of Uncertainty Formalisms

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 1455))

Abstract

This paper contains two parts: we first investigate the idea of reasoning, in a “local” way, with prioritized and possibly inconsistent knowledge bases. Priorities are not given globally between all the beliefs in the knowledge base, but locally within each minimal set of pieces of information responsible for inconsistencies. This local stratification offers more flexibility for representing priorities between beliefs. When this stratification is available, we show that the task of coping with inconsistency is greatly simplified, since it determines what beliefs must be removed in order to restore consistency in the knowledge base. Three local approaches are developed in this paper. The second part of the paper applies one of these three approaches to default reasoning. Our proposal for defining the specificity relation inside conflicts allows us to infer plausible conclusions which cannot be obtained if a global stratification is used. In each part, we provide a comparative study with existing inconsistency-handling approaches and with various default reasoning systems, respectively.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. IRIT, Université Paul Sabatier, 118, route de Narbonne, 31062, Toulouse Cedex, France

    Salem Benferhat & Laurent Garcia

Authors
  1. Salem Benferhat
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  2. Laurent Garcia
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK

    Anthony Hunter

  2. Queen Mary and Westfield College, Department of Electronic Engineering, University of London, London, E1 4NS, UK

    Simon Parsons

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© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Benferhat, S., Garcia, L. (1998). A local handling of inconsistent knowledge and default bases. In: Hunter, A., Parsons, S. (eds) Applications of Uncertainty Formalisms. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 1455. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-49426-X_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-49426-X_15

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-65312-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49426-3

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