Certain answer

Last updated

In database theory and knowledge representation, the one of the certain answers is the set of answers to a given query consisting of the intersection of all the complete databases that are consistent with a given knowledge base. [1] The notion of certain answer, investigated in database theory since the 1970s, [1] is indeed defined in the context of open world assumption, where the given knowledge base is assumed to be incomplete.

Contents

Intuitively, certain answers are the answers that are always returned when querying a given knowledge base, considering both the extensional knowledge that the possible implications inferred by automatic reasoning, regardless of the specific interpretation.

Definition

In literature, the set of certain answers is usually defined as follows: [1]

where:

In description logics, such set may be defined in a similar way as follows: [2]

Given an ontology and a query on , is the set of tuples such that, for each model of , we have that .

Where:

See also

Related Research Articles

In mathematics, a quadric or quadric surface (quadric hypersurface in higher dimensions), is a generalization of conic sections (ellipses, parabolas, and hyperbolas). It is a hypersurface (of dimension D) in a (D + 1)-dimensional space, and it is defined as the zero set of an irreducible polynomial of degree two in D + 1 variables; for example, D = 1 in the case of conic sections. When the defining polynomial is not absolutely irreducible, the zero set is generally not considered a quadric, although it is often called a degenerate quadric or a reducible quadric.

Description logics (DL) are a family of formal knowledge representation languages. Many DLs are more expressive than propositional logic but less expressive than first-order logic. In contrast to the latter, the core reasoning problems for DLs are (usually) decidable, and efficient decision procedures have been designed and implemented for these problems. There are general, spatial, temporal, spatiotemporal, and fuzzy description logics, and each description logic features a different balance between expressive power and reasoning complexity by supporting different sets of mathematical constructors.

The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies. Ontologies are a formal way to describe taxonomies and classification networks, essentially defining the structure of knowledge for various domains: the nouns representing classes of objects and the verbs representing relations between the objects.

In mathematics, the transitive closureR+ of a homogeneous binary relation R on a set X is the smallest relation on X that contains R and is transitive. For finite sets, "smallest" can be taken in its usual sense, of having the fewest related pairs; for infinite sets R+ is the unique minimal transitive superset of R.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Electrostatics</span> Study of stationary or slow-moving electric charges

Electrostatics is a branch of physics that studies slow-moving or stationary electric charges.

Belief revision is the process of changing beliefs to take into account a new piece of information. The logical formalization of belief revision is researched in philosophy, in databases, and in artificial intelligence for the design of rational agents.

In statistics and information theory, a maximum entropy probability distribution has entropy that is at least as great as that of all other members of a specified class of probability distributions. According to the principle of maximum entropy, if nothing is known about a distribution except that it belongs to a certain class, then the distribution with the largest entropy should be chosen as the least-informative default. The motivation is twofold: first, maximizing entropy minimizes the amount of prior information built into the distribution; second, many physical systems tend to move towards maximal entropy configurations over time.

The closed-world assumption (CWA), in a formal system of logic used for knowledge representation, is the presumption that a statement that is true is also known to be true. Therefore, conversely, what is not currently known to be true, is false. The same name also refers to a logical formalization of this assumption by Raymond Reiter. The opposite of the closed-world assumption is the open-world assumption (OWA), stating that lack of knowledge does not imply falsity. Decisions on CWA vs. OWA determine the understanding of the actual semantics of a conceptual expression with the same notations of concepts. A successful formalization of natural language semantics usually cannot avoid an explicit revelation of whether the implicit logical backgrounds are based on CWA or OWA.

Patrick John Hayes FAAAI is a British computer scientist who lives and works in the United States. As of March 2006, he is a senior research scientist at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition in Pensacola, Florida.

The concept of a stable model, or answer set, is used to define a declarative semantics for logic programs with negation as failure. This is one of several standard approaches to the meaning of negation in logic programming, along with program completion and the well-founded semantics. The stable model semantics is the basis of answer set programming.

In computer science, locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) is a fuzzy hashing technique that hashes similar input items into the same "buckets" with high probability. Since similar items end up in the same buckets, this technique can be used for data clustering and nearest neighbor search. It differs from conventional hashing techniques in that hash collisions are maximized, not minimized. Alternatively, the technique can be seen as a way to reduce the dimensionality of high-dimensional data; high-dimensional input items can be reduced to low-dimensional versions while preserving relative distances between items.

Differential privacy (DP) is an approach for providing privacy while sharing information about a group of individuals, by describing the patterns within the group while withholding information about specific individuals. This is done by making arbitrary small changes to individual data that do not change the statistics of interest. Thus the data cannot be used to infer much about any individual.

An electric dipole transition is the dominant effect of an interaction of an electron in an atom with the electromagnetic field.

In artificial intelligence and related fields, an argumentation framework is a way to deal with contentious information and draw conclusions from it using formalized arguments.

Logical consequence is a fundamental concept in logic which describes the relationship between statements that hold true when one statement logically follows from one or more statements. A valid logical argument is one in which the conclusion is entailed by the premises, because the conclusion is the consequence of the premises. The philosophical analysis of logical consequence involves the questions: In what sense does a conclusion follow from its premises? and What does it mean for a conclusion to be a consequence of premises? All of philosophical logic is meant to provide accounts of the nature of logical consequence and the nature of logical truth.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Loop representation in gauge theories and quantum gravity</span> Description of gauge theories using loop operators

Attempts have been made to describe gauge theories in terms of extended objects such as Wilson loops and holonomies. The loop representation is a quantum hamiltonian representation of gauge theories in terms of loops. The aim of the loop representation in the context of Yang–Mills theories is to avoid the redundancy introduced by Gauss gauge symmetries allowing to work directly in the space of physical states. The idea is well known in the context of lattice Yang–Mills theory. Attempts to explore the continuous loop representation was made by Gambini and Trias for canonical Yang–Mills theory, however there were difficulties as they represented singular objects. As we shall see the loop formalism goes far beyond a simple gauge invariant description, in fact it is the natural geometrical framework to treat gauge theories and quantum gravity in terms of their fundamental physical excitations.

Information field theory (IFT) is a Bayesian statistical field theory relating to signal reconstruction, cosmography, and other related areas. IFT summarizes the information available on a physical field using Bayesian probabilities. It uses computational techniques developed for quantum field theory and statistical field theory to handle the infinite number of degrees of freedom of a field and to derive algorithms for the calculation of field expectation values. For example, the posterior expectation value of a field generated by a known Gaussian process and measured by a linear device with known Gaussian noise statistics is given by a generalized Wiener filter applied to the measured data. IFT extends such known filter formula to situations with nonlinear physics, nonlinear devices, non-Gaussian field or noise statistics, dependence of the noise statistics on the field values, and partly unknown parameters of measurement. For this it uses Feynman diagrams, renormalisation flow equations, and other methods from mathematical physics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Error tolerance (PAC learning)</span>

In PAC learning, error tolerance refers to the ability of an algorithm to learn when the examples received have been corrupted in some way. In fact, this is a very common and important issue since in many applications it is not possible to access noise-free data. Noise can interfere with the learning process at different levels: the algorithm may receive data that have been occasionally mislabeled, or the inputs may have some false information, or the classification of the examples may have been maliciously adulterated.

ProbLog is a probabilistic logic programming that extends Prolog with probabilities. It minimally extends Prolog by adding the notion of a probabilistic fact, which combines the idea of logic atoms and random variables. Similarly to Prolog, ProbLog can query an atom. While Prolog returns the truth value of the queried atom, ProbLog returns the probability of it being true.

The Vadalog system is a Knowledge Graph Management System (KGMS) that offers a language for performing complex logic reasoning tasks over knowledge graphs. At the same time, Vadalog delivers a platform to support the entire spectrum of data science tasks: data integration, pre-processing, statistical analysis, machine learning, algorithmic modeling, probabilistic reasoning and temporal reasoning. Its language is based on an extension of the rule-based language Datalog, Warded Datalog±, a high-performance language using an aggressive termination control strategy. Vadalog can support the entire spectrum of data science activities and tools. The system can read from and connect to multiple sources, from relational databases, such as PostgreSQL and MySQL, to graph databases, such as Neo4j, as well as make use of machine learning tools, and a web data extraction tool, OXPath. Additional Python libraries and extensions can also be easily integrated into the system.

References

  1. 1 2 3 ( Libkin 2015 ).
  2. ( Kontchakov et al. 2011 ).

Further reading