26247223
Combining Description Logic and Defeasible Logic for the Semantic Web
The importance of integrating rules and ontologies for the Semantic Web has been well addressed by many researchers. Defeasible Logic is a simple but efficient nonmonotonic language which can handle both defeasibility and priority. In this paper we propose a novel approach to combining Defeasible Logic with Description Logics by introducing the Description Defeasible Logic (DDL). DDL is similar to Defeasible Logic but it also contains queries to the Description Logic knowledge base. DDL allows nonmonotonic reasoning to be built on top of ontologies, and to a certain degree, allows ontologies to be built on top of nonmonotonic reasoning. We give some basic properties of DDL, one of which shows that DDL is a tractable language provided that the underlying Description Logic is tractable.
5228937
Merging and Aligning Ontologies in dl-Programs
The language of dl-programs is a latest effort in developing an expressive representation for Web-based ontologies. It allows to build answer set programming (ASP) on top of description logic and thus some attractive features of ASP can be employed in the design of the Semantic Web architecture. In this paper we first generalize dl-programs by allowing multiple knowledge bases and then accordingly, define the answer set semantics for the dl-programs. A novel technique called forgetting is developed in the setting of dl-programs and applied to ontology merging and aligning.
1885288
A Theory of Forgetting in Logic Programming
The study of forgetting for reasoning has attracted considerable attention in AI. However, much of the work on forgetting, and other related approaches such as independence, irrelevance and novelty, has been restricted to the classical logics. This paper describes a detailed theoretical investigation of the notion of forgetting in the context of logic programming. We first provide a semantic definition of forgetting under the answer sets for extended logic programs. We then discuss the desirable properties and some motivating examples. An important result of this study is an algorithm for computing the result of forgetting in a logic program. Furthermore, we present a modified version of the algorithm and show that the time complexity of the new algorithm is polynomial with respect to the size of the given logic program if the size of certain rules is fixed. We show how the proposed theory of forgetting can be used to characterize the logic program updates.
2316989
Observation-based Model for BDI-Agents
We present a new computational model of BDI-agents, called the observation-based BDI-model. The key point of this BDI-model is to express agents' beliefs, desires and intentions as a set of runs (computing paths), which is exactly a system in the interpreted system model, a well-known agent model due to Halpern and his colleagues. Our BDI-model is computationally grounded in that we are able to associate the BDI-agent model with a computer program, and formulas, involving agents' beliefs, desires (goals) and intentions, can be understood as properties of program computations. We present a sound and complete proof system with respect to our BDI-model and explore how symbolic model checking techniques can be applied to model checking BDI-agents. In order to make our BDI-model more flexible and practically realistic, we generalize it so that agents can have multiple sources of beliefs, goals and intentions.
1889167
An Extension to GCWA and Query Evaluation for Disjunctive Deductive Databases
We present a simple and intuitive extension GCWAG of the generalized closed world assumption (GCWA) from positive disjunctive deductive databases to general disjunctive deductive databases (with default negation). This semantics is defined in terms of unfounded sets and possesses an argumentation-theoretic characterization. We also provide a top-down procedure for GCWAG, which is sound and complete with respect to GCWAG. We investigate two query evaluation methods for GCWAG: database partition, and database splitting. The basic idea of these methods is to divide the original deductive database into several smaller sub-databases and the query evaluation in the original database is transformed into the problem of query evaluation in smaller or simplified components. We prove that these two methods of query evaluation are all sound with respect to GCWAG.
15783530
A Top-Down Procedure for Disjunctive Well-Founded Semantics
Skepticism is one of the most important semantic intuitions in artificial intelligence. The semantics formalizing skeptical reasoning in (disjunctive) logic programming is usually named well-founded semantics. However, the issue of defining and computing the well-founded semantics for disjunctive programs and databases has proved to be far more complex and difficult than for normal logic programs. The argumentation-based semantics WFDS is among the most promising proposals that attempts to define a natural well-founded semantics for disjunctive programs. In this paper, we propose a top-down procedure for WFDS called D-SLS Resolution, which naturally extends the Global SLS-resolution and SLI-resolution. We prove that D-SLS Resolution is sound and complete with respect to WFDS. This result in turn provides a further yet more powerful argument in favor of the WFDS.
11784167
An access control language for web services
This paper presents an approach for formally specifying and enforcing security policies on web service implementations. Networked services in general, and web services in particular, require extensive amounts of code to ensure that clients respect site-integrity constraints. We provide a language by which these constraints can be expressed and enforced automatically, portably and efficiently. Security policies in our system are specified in a language based on temporal logic, and are processed by an enforcement engine to yield site and platform-specific access control code. This code is integrated with a web server and platform-specific libraries to enforce the specified policy on a given web service. Our approach decouples the security policy specification from service implementations, provides a mandatory access control model for web services, and achieves good performance. We show that up to 22% of the code in a traditional web service module is dedicated to security checking functionality, including checks for client sequencing and parameter validation. We show that our prototype language implementation, WebGuard, enables web programmers to significantly reduce the amount of security checking code they need to develop manually. The quality of the code generated by WebGuard from formal policy specifications is competitive with the latency of handcrafted code to within a few percent.
12098916
Binary decision diagram with minimum expected path length
We present methods to generate a Binary Decision Diagram (BDD) with minimum expected path length. A BDD is a generic data structure which is widely used in several fields. One important application is the representation of Boolean functions. A BDD representation enables us to evaluate a Boolean function: Simply traverse the BDD from the root node to the terminal node and retrieve the value in the terminal node. For a BDD with minimum expected path length will be also minimized the evaluation time for the corresponding Boolean function. Three efficient algorithms for constructing BDDs with minimum expected path length are proposed.
2174685
Privacy-enhancing personalized web search
Personalized web search is a promising way to improve search quality by customizing search results for people with individual information goals. However, users are uncomfortable with exposing private preference information to search engines. On the other hand, privacy is not absolute, and often can be compromised if there is a gain in service or profitability to the user. Thus, a balance must be struck between search quality and privacy protection. This paper presents a scalable way for users to automatically build rich user profiles. These profiles summarize a user.s interests into a hierarchical organization according to specific interests. Two parameters for specifying privacy requirements are proposed to help the user to choose the content and degree of detail of the profile information that is exposed to the search engine. Experiments showed that the user profile improved search quality when compared to standard MSN rankings. More importantly, results verified our hypothesis that a significant improvement on search quality can be achieved by only sharing some higher-level user profile information, which is potentially less sensitive than detailed personal information.
52857819
QUICK: graphical user interface to multiple databases
Formulating queries to access multiple databases can be a formidable task, especially when many terms from various databases and complex constraints are involved. To specify a multidatabase query, the user usually has to search through documents for exact database terms and learn the multidatabase language. The report presents QUICK (QUery Interface to CPL-Kleisli), a graphical user interface to multiple databases, CPL is a high-level multidatabase language built on top of an open query system Kleisli. QUICK allows users to handle overwhelming information from different data sources in an intuitive and uniform manner. The query specification is reduced to specifying user's terms in his/her own world, selecting paths and specifying constraints in a graph. QUICK is able to automatically generate a CPL query that corresponds to the user's intent.
9884844
Parallel multilevel block ILU preconditioning techniques for large sparse linear systems
We present a class of parallel preconditioning strategies built on a multilevel block incomplete LU (ILU)factorization technique to solve large sparse linear systems on distributed memory parallel computers. The preconditioners are constructed by using the concept of block independent sets. Two algorithms for constructing block independent sets of a distributed sparse matrix are proposed. We compare a few implementations of the parallel multilevel ILU preconditioners with different block independent set algorithms and different coarse level solution strategies. We also use some diagonal thresholding and perturbation strategies to enhance factorization stability. Numerical experiments indicate that our parallel multilevel block ILU preconditioners are robust and efficient.