On Jan 12, 2007, at 9:36 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Recently I had an interesting conversation with Werner Cuesters,
professor in Bufallo and colleague of Barry Smith. He has some
theory about ontology maintenance and versioning and it considers
both "classes" and "instances". Both can change either because you
made en error, either you view on the world changed, either because
the world changed . It turns out that you can only handle changes
if you know for each change exactly what de reason of the change
was. That reason should be documented in the system.
[snip]
The standard lingo for this is that a change to the knowledge base
due to a change in the *world* is called an *update* whereas a change
in your knowledge base due to a change in *your knowledge* of the
(current static) world is called a *revision*. The locus classicus
for this, IMHO, is:
<http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/417296.html>
Following there model theoretic accounts, there is a spate of work
defining reasoning services that compute the updated or revisied
knowledge base given a proposed update or revision. E.g., recently:
<http://lat.inf.tu-dresden.de/~clu/papers/archive/kr06c.pdf>
The utility of model oriented revision and update for expressive
logics is, IMHO, not fully established, though it is conceptually
useful in my experience. There is, of course, a large chunk of work
on revising (and even updating) belief *bases*, that is, attending
primarily to the *asserted* set of formulae.
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Bijan.
