SNePSwD: A newcomer to the SNePS family
Maria R. Cravo, João Pavão Martins · Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence · 1993
SNePS 2.1 is a knowledge representation and reasoning system that records the dependencies among propositions that are needed to perform a revision of beliefs when a contradiction is detected. The reasoning of SNePS 2.1 is based on a monotonic logic and the system has no provisos for performing an automatic revision of beliefs. In this paper we present SNePSwD that extends the capabilities of SNePS 2.1 along two dimensions: (1) it is able to represent default rules and to perform default reasoning, i.e. the logic underlying SNePSwD is non-monotonic; (2) it accepts the specification of preferences between hypotheses and uses them to decide which hypotheses to discard to resolve a contradiction. This latter possibility allows a semi-automatic contradiction resolution (in some cases, even completely automatic). We discuss the motivations for the creation of SNePSwD, present the form of default rules it uses, discuss the meaning of each of the three kinds of consequence, and describe how preferences can be specified among propositions and how these preferences are used in the process of belief revision. Finally we present examples that illustrate the aspects discussed in the paper.