Towards the Systematic Development of Description Logic Reasoners: CLASP Reconstructed.
Alexander T. Borgida · 1992
It is argued that considerable benefits can be obtained by making KR&R systems easily extendable, so that new language constructs can be added on a per-application basis. In order to achieve this extensibility we need techniques for formally specifying the extensions, and for modularly and locally modifying the implementations. We present two such techniques applicable to the family of reasoners based on Description/Terminological Logics, namely natural semantics rules of inference, and the protodl customizable KBMS architecture. The bulk of the paper aims to demonstrate the efficacy of these techniques, together with some heuristics for their use, by showing how we could reconstruct a previously proposed description logic: Devanbu and Litman's extension to classic, called clasp, designed to reason about actions and plans. In the process, we uncover a few deficiencies in the original proposal, and provide for the first time a formal semantics for clasp. 1 Introduction and Aims Knowl...