Logic and inheritance

ABSTRACT

An elaboration of the Prolog language is described in which the notion of first-order term is replaced by a more general one. This extended form of terms allows the integration of inheritance---an <i>IS-A</i> taxonomy---directly into the unification process rather than indirectly through the resolution-based inference mechanism of Prolog. This results in more efficient computations and enhanced language expressiveness. The language thus obtained, called LOGIN, subsumes Prolog, in the sense that conventional Prolog programs are equally well executed by LOGIN.

REFERENCES

• 1: Alfred V. Aho , John E. Hopcroft, The Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1974
• 2: Hassan Ait-Kaci, A lattice theoretic approach to computation based on a calculus of partially ordered type structures (property inheritance, semantic nets, graph unification), 1984
• 3: H Aït-Kaci , R Nasr, Login: A logic programming language with built-in inheritance, Journal of Logic Programming, v.3 n.3, p.185-215, Oct. 1986 [doi>10.1016/0743-1066(86)90013-0]
• 4: James F. Allen , Alan M. Frisch, What's in a semantic network?, Proceedings of the 20th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics, June 16-18, 1982, Toronto, Ontario, Canada [doi>10.3115/981251.981256]
• 5: Brachman, R. J., Fikes, R. E., and Levesque, H. J. "KRYPTON: A Functional Approach to Knowledge Representation", FLAIR Technical Report <i>No 16,</i> Fairchild Lab. for Artificial Intelligence Research, Fairchild Research Center. Palo Alto, May 1983.
• 6: Amaryllis Deliyanni , Robert A. Kowalski, Logic and semantic networks, Communications of the ACM, v.22 n.3, p.184-192, March 1979 [doi>10.1145/359080.359090]
• 7: Huet, G. <i>R&eacute;solution d'Equations dans des Langages d'Ordre 1, 2, ..., w.</i> Th&egrave;se de Doctorat d'Etat, Universit&eacute; de Paris VII, France. 1976.
• 8: Kowalski, R. A. "Logic for Data Description", In <i>Logic and Data Bases,</i> Gallaire, H., and Minker, J. (Eds.), pp.77--103. Plenum Press, 1978.
• 9: McSkimin, J. R., and Minker, J. "A Predicate Calculus Based Semantic Network for Question-Answering Systems", In <i>Associative Networks---The Representation and Use of Knowledge by Computers,</i> Findler, N. (Ed.). Academic Press, New York, 1979.
• 10: Reynolds, J. C. "Transformational Systems and the Algebraic Structure of Atomic Formulas", In <i>Machine Intelligence 5,</i> Michie, D. (Ed.). Edinburgh University Press, 1970.
• 11: J. A. Robinson, A Machine-Oriented Logic Based on the Resolution Principle, Journal of the ACM (JACM), v.12 n.1, p.23-41, Jan. 1965 [doi>10.1145/321250.321253]