Abstract

Knowledge-base (KB) systems must typically deal with imperfection in knowledge, e.g. in the form of imcompleteness, inconsistency, uncertainty, to name a few. Currently KB system development is mainly based on the expert system technology. Expert systems, through their support for rule-based programming, uncertainty, etc., offer a convenient framework for KB system development. But they require the user to be well versed with the low level details of system implementation. The manner in which uncertainty is handled has little mathematical basis. There is no decent notion of query optimization, forcing the user to take the responsibility for an efficient implementation of the KB system. We contend KB system development can and should take advantage of the deductive database technology, which overcomes most of the above limitations. An important problem here is to extend deductive databases into providing a systematic basis for rule-based programming with imperfect knowledge. In this paper, we are interested in an exension handling probabilistic knowledge.

Citations