Object-Oriented First-Order Logic.
Eyal Amir · 1999
First-Order Logic (FOL) provides richness of representation, but is unwieldy in modeling large, complex tasks. On the other hand, the Object-Oriented paradigm has been successful in treating large, complex tasks in both software and knowledge engineering. This paper describes a novel logic that extends FOL to create counterparts of the Object-Oriented paradigm. We call this logic Object-Oriented First-Order Logic (OOFOL). In this logic, objects are theories that are connected via interface vocabularies to other objects, classes are used to provide a reusable logical template, and inheritance is used to adapt classes to specialized tasks. We show that such a logic can be given simple semantics using FOL. A variant of the logic that allows some links between the objects to be unidirectional is also examined. This variant is called Directed ObjectOriented First-Order Logic (Directed OOFOL). It is shown that such a system can be given semantics using the nonmonotonic method of Circumscript...