dlm@research.att.COM (01/18/88)
Title: A Four-Valued Semantics for Terminological Logics Speaker: Peter F. Patel-Schneider Schlumberger Palo Alto Research 3340 Hillview Ave. Palo Alto, California 94304 Date: Monday, January 18, 1988 Time: 10:30 AM Place: AT&T Bell Laboratories - Murray Hill 3D-473 Terminological logics formalize and extend the notions of concepts, roles, and restrictions present in semantic networks, frame-based systems, and object-oriented programming systems. The most important semantic relationship in these logics is subsumption-whether one concept is more general than another. Subsumption is a non-trivial relationship and if the terminological logic is expressively powerful, then determining whether one concept subsumes another is computationally intractable. Because of this intractability, knowledge representation systems based on terminological logics are not suitable for use in knowledge-based systems. This problem can be solved by using a four-valued semantics, resulting in an expressively powerful terminological logic which has tractable subsumption. The subsumptions supported by the logic are a type of "structural" subsumption, where each structural component of one concept must have an analogue in the other concept. Structural subsumption captures an important set of subsumptions, similar to the subsumptions computed in KL-ONE and NIKL. The four-valued semantics can thus be used to develop object-based knowledge representation systems suitable for use in knowledge-based systems. Sponsor: Ron Brachman