Restricted Monotonicity

Abstract

A knowledge representation problem can be sometimes viewed as an element of a family of problems, with parameters corresponding to possible assumptions about the domain under consideration. When additional assumptions are made, the class of domains that are being described becomes smaller, so that the class of conclusions that are true in all the domains becomes larger. As a result, a satisfactory solution to a parametric knowledge representation problem on the basis of some nonmonotonic formalism can be expected to have a certain formal property, that we call restricted monotonicity. We argue that it is important to recognize parametric knowledge representation problems and to verify restricted monotonicity for their proposed solutions. Introduction This paper is about the methodology of representing knowledge in nonmonotonic formalisms. A knowledge representation problem can be sometimes viewed as an element of a family of problems, with parameters corresponding to possible assumpt...