Consistency of Knowledge in an Inheritance System with Regular Expressions

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a knowledge representation and reasoning scheme DOT^<*￢>, in which dot notations and regular expressions are used for representing IS-A relation as well as IS-NOT-A relation. Transferring a given knowledge expressed by regular expressions into an equivalent knowledge expressed without using regular expression, it is shown that the consistency of the knowledge can be decided in polynomial time. Since the system is closed under inference process in regular sets of dot notations, we can realize the reasoning mechanism defined on regular sets and incrementally specify a new knowledge in DOT^<*￢>.