A Local Approach to Reasoning with Conditional Knowle
Salem Benferhat, Laurent Garcia · 1996
This paper investigates a local approach for reasoning wilh conditional knowledge bases (with default rules of the form generally, if a then P'' and having possibly some exceptions). The idea is that when a conflict appears (due to observing exceptional situations), we first localize the seis of pieces of information which are responsible for conflicts. Next, using specificity principle (subclasses must be preferred to general classes), we atlach priorities to default rules inside each conflict. These priorilies. implicitly computed from the knowledge base, reflecl rhe hierarchical structure of the knowledge base. Lastly, we rank-order and solve conflicts in a way that only miniinol sets of rules are given up from the knowledge base in order to restore its consistency. This local way to deal with conflicts addresses correctly the well known problerns of specificity, irrelevance, blocking of inheritance, etc.