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Thirty years of Epistemic Specifications

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2021

JORGE FANDINNO Open the ORCID record for JORGE FANDINNO [Opens in a new window] ,
WOLFGANG FABER Open the ORCID record for WOLFGANG FABER [Opens in a new window]  and
MICHAEL GELFOND Open the ORCID record for MICHAEL GELFOND [Opens in a new window]
JORGE FANDINNO
Affiliation:
University of NebraskaOmaha, USA University of Potsdam, Germany (e-mail: jfandinno@unomaha.edu)
WOLFGANG FABER
Affiliation:
Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria (e-mail: wolfgang.faber@aau.at)
MICHAEL GELFOND
Affiliation:
Texas Tech University, USA (e-mail: michael.gelfond@ttu.edu)
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Abstract

The language of epistemic specifications and epistemic logic programs extends disjunctive logic programs under the stable model semantics with modal constructs called subjective literals. Using subjective literals, it is possible to check whether a regular literal is true in every or some stable models of the program, those models, in this context also called belief sets, being collected in a set called world view. This allows for representing, within the language, whether some proposition should be understood accordingly to the open or the closed world assumption. Several attempts for capturing the intuitions underlying the language by means of a formal semantics were given, resulting in a multitude of proposals that makes it difficult to understand the current state of the art. In this article, we provide an overview of the inception of the field and the knowledge representation and reasoning tasks it is suitable for. We also provide a detailed analysis of properties of proposed semantics, and an outlook of challenges to be tackled by future research in the area.

Keywords

answer set programmingepistemic logic programsepistemic specificationsepistemic reasoningautopistemic logic
Type
Survey Article
Information
Theory and Practice of Logic Programming , Volume 22 , Issue 6 , November 2022 , pp. 1043 - 1083
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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