ML systems: A Proof Theory for Contexts

Serafini, Luciano and Giunchiglia, Fausto (2000) ML systems: A Proof Theory for Contexts. UNSPECIFIED.

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    Abstract

    In the last decade the concept of context has been extensively exploited in many research areas, e.g., distributed artificial intelligence, multi agent systems, distributed databases, information integration, cognitive science, and epistemology. Three alternative approaches to the formalization of the notion of context have been proposed: Giunchiglia and Serafini's Multi Language Systems (ML systems), McCarthy's modal logics of contexts, and Gabbay's Labelled Deductive Systems. Previous papers have argued in favor of ML systems with respect to the other approaches. Our aim in this paper is to support these arguments from a theoretical perspective. We provide a very general definition of ML systems, which covers all the ML systems used in the literature, and we develop a proof theory for an important subclass of them: the MR systems. We prove various important results; among other things, we prove a normal form theorem, the sub-formula property, and the decidability of an important instance of the class of the MR systems. The paper concludes with a detailed comparison among the alternative approaches.

    Item Type: Departmental Technical Report
    Department or Research center: Information Engineering and Computer Science
    Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA075 Electronic computers. Computer science
    Uncontrolled Keywords: Contextual Reasoning, Distributed Information-Oriented Theories, Modal Logics, Multi Context systems, Normal Form, Proof Theory
    Additional Information: Submitted to the Journal of Logic Language and Information, June 2002
    Report Number: DIT-02-006
    Repository staff approval on: 03 Jul 2002

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