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Abductive Logic Programming for Normative Reasoning and Ontologies

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New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (JSAI-isAI 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10091))

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Abstract

Abductive Logic Programming (ALP) has been exploited to formalize societies of agents, commitments and norms, taking advantage from ALP operational support as a (static or dynamic) verification tool. In [7], the most common deontic operators (obligation, prohibition, permission) are mapped into the abductive expectations of an ALP framework for agent societies. Building upon such correspondence, in [5], authors introduced \(Deon^{+}\), a language where obligation and prohibition deontic operators are enriched with quantification over time, by means of ALP and Constraint Logic Programming (CLP).

In recent work [30, 31], we have shown that the same ALP framework can be suitable to represent Datalog\(^\pm \) ontologies. Ontologies are a fundamental component of both the Semantic Web and knowledge-based systems, even in the legal setting, since they provide a formal and machine manipulable model of a domain.

In this work, we show that ALP is a suitable framework for representing both norms and ontologies. Normative reasoning and ontological query answering are obtained by applying the same abductive proof procedure, smoothly achieving their integration. In particular, we consider the ALP framework named \(\mathcal {S}\text {CIFF}\)  and derived from the IFF abductive framework, able to deal with existentially (and universally) quantified variables in rule heads and CLP constraints.

The main advantage is that this integration is achieved within a single language, grounded on abduction in computational logic.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The universal quantifiers are usually left implicit.

  2. 2.

    We show for the sake of clarity the quantification of existentially quantified variables, although in the \(\mathcal {S}\text {CIFF}\) syntax the quantification is implicit.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous referees for their helpful comments, and JURISIN2015 participants for questions and discussions during the workshop. The second author would like to thank NII, Tokyo (J), for supporting her travel to Japan and for making possible to attend JURISIN2015.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Ingegneria, University of Ferrara, via Saragat 1, 44122, Ferrara, Italy

    Marco Gavanelli, Evelina Lamma, Elena Bellodi, Zese Riccardo & Giuseppe Cota

  2. Dipartimento di Matematica e Informatica, University of Ferrara, via Saragat 1, 44122, Ferrara, Italy

    Fabrizio Riguzzi

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  1. Marco Gavanelli
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Correspondence to Marco Gavanelli .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Chiba University Graduate School of Engineering, Chiba, Japan

    Mihoko Otake

  2. University of Tsukuba, Tokyo, Japan

    Setsuya Kurahashi

  3. Fujitsu Laboratories, Kanagawa, Japan

    Yuiko Ota

  4. National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan

    Ken Satoh

  5. Ochanomizu University, Tokyo, Japan

    Daisuke Bekki

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Gavanelli, M., Lamma, E., Riguzzi, F., Bellodi, E., Riccardo, Z., Cota, G. (2017). Abductive Logic Programming for Normative Reasoning and Ontologies. In: Otake, M., Kurahashi, S., Ota, Y., Satoh, K., Bekki, D. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10091. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50953-2_14

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