RE: Merging Rulesets

• From: Gerd Wagner <wagnerg@tu-cottbus.de>
• Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2005 11:00:28 +0200
• To: "'Sandro Hawke'" <sandro@w3.org>
• Cc: <public-rule-workshop-discuss@w3.org>
• Message-Id: <20050829090154.CA08E508218@smtp2.TU-Cottbus.De>

> The Semantic Web applications I'm familiar with (including everything
> based on cwm, some of my prolog work, and various things I hear about)
> all merge rulesets freely by just puting them together (concatenation,
> set-union, conjunction, etc).  

I think this is a very naive approach that only works if your 
rules are written in a severely restricted language such as
RDF or Datalog.

> It's trivial with RDF, OWL, N3, and FOL (when you use URIs for names).

I don't think it's trivial for OWL and FOL where you could get
various kinds of inconsistencies that would have to be resolved,
which would lead to nonmonotonicity. This problem is well-known 
in the KR community, and the prominent topic of belief revision 
is closely related to this issue of merging rules.

-Gerd

Received on Monday, 29 August 2005 09:02:01 UTC