Relevant to philosophy, law, management, and artificial intelligence, these papers explore the applicability of nonmonotonic or defeasible logic to normative reasoning. The resulting systems purport to solve well-known deontic paradoxes and to provide a better treatment than classical deontic logic does of prima facie obligation, conditional obligation, and priorities of normative principles.
This book presents adaptive logics as an intuitive and powerful framework for modeling defeasible reasoning. It examines various contexts in which defeasible reasoning is useful and offers a compact introduction into adaptive logics. The author first familiarizes readers with defeasible reasoning, the adaptive logics framework, combinations of adaptive logics, and a range of useful meta-theoretic properties. He then offers a systematic study of adaptive logics based on various applications. The book presents formal models for defeasible reasoning stemming from different contexts, such as default reasoning, argumentation, and normative reasoning. It highlights various meta-theoretic advantages of adaptive logics over other logics or logical frameworks that model defeasible reasoning. In this way the book substantiates the status of adaptive logics as a generic formal framework for defeasible reasoning.
We welcome Volume 20, Formal Aspects of Context. Context has always been recognised as strongly relevant to models in language, philosophy, logic and artifi cial intelligence. In recent years theoretical advances in these areas and especially in logic have accelerated the study of context in the international community. An annual conference is held and many researchers have come to realise that many of the old puzzles should be reconsidered with proper attention to context. The volume editors and contributors are from among the most active front-line researchers in the area and the contents shows how wide and vigorous this area is. There are strong scientific connections with earlier volumes in the series. I am confident that the appearance of this book in our series will help secure the study of context as an important area of applied logic. D.M.Gabbay INTRODUCTION This book is a result of the First International and Interdisciplinary Con ference on Modelling and Using Context, which was organised in Rio de Janeiro in January 1997, and contains a selection of the papers presented there, refereed and revised through a process of anonymous peer review. The treatment of contexts as bona-fide objects of logical formalisation has gained wide acceptance in recent years, following the seminal impetus by McCarthy in his 'lUring award address.
This volume provides a selection of strictly refereed papers first presented during a workshop held within the context of the ESPRIT ModelAge Project in Certosa di Pertignano, Italy, in 1997. The 15 revised full papers presented together with an introductory survey by the volume editors were carefully reviewed for inclusion in the book. The book is devoted to the interdisciplinary study of formal models of agency and intelligent agents from the points of view of artificial intelligence, software engineering, applied logic, databases, and organization theory. Among the topics addressed are various types of agents and multi-agent systems, cooperation, communication, specification, verification, deontic logic, diagnosis, and decision making.
Labelled deduction is an approach to providing frameworks for presenting and using different logics in a uniform and natural way by enriching the language of a logic with additional information of a semantic proof-theoretical nature. Labelled deduction systems often possess attractive properties, such as modularity in the way that families of related logics are presented, parameterised proofs of metatheoretic properties, and ease of mechanisability. It is thus not surprising that labelled deduction has been applied to problems in computer science, AI, mathematical logic, cognitive science, philosophy and computational linguistics - for example, formalizing and reasoning about dynamic `state oriented' properties such as knowledge, belief, time, space, and resources.
This volume contains the papers presented at the Second International and - terdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context (CONTEXT’99), held in Trento (Italy) from 9 to 11 September 1999. CONTEXT’99 is the second in the CONTEXT series. The rst was held in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) in 1997. The CONTEXT conference series is meant to provide an interdisciplinary - rum where researchers can exchange ideas, methodologies, and results on c- text, and is increasingly becoming an important reference for all people doing research on context. This is testi ed by the larger number of research areas that are represented at CONTEXT’99 (in particular, Philosophy and Cognitive Psychology were not signi cantly present at the rst conference), and by the number and quality of submitted papers. Speci cally, we received 118 papers, mostly of good or excellent quality. Among them, 33 (28%) have been accepted as full papers, and 21 as short papers. We think it is fair to say that the 54 papers collected in this volume provide a signi cant picture of the international research on context currently going on. The notion of context plays an important role in many areas, both theoretical and applied, such as Formal Logic, Arti cial Intelligence, Philosophy, Pragm- ics, Computational Linguistics, Computer Science, Cognitive Psychology.
This volume contains the papers selected for presentation at the conference and two abstracts from invited speakers. The programme committee selected these 25 papers from 12 countries out of 65 submissions from 17 countries. The rst JELIA meeting was in Rosco , France, ten years ago. Afterwards, it took place in the Netherlands, Germany, United Kingdom, Portugal, and now again in Germany. The proceedings of the last four meetings appeared in the Springer-Verlag LNCS series, and a selected series of papers of the English and the Portuguese meeting appeared as special issues in the Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics and in the Journal of Automated Reasoning, respectively. The aim of JELIA was and still is to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and results in the domain of foundations of AI, focusing on rigorous descriptions of some aspects of intelligence. These descriptions are promoted by applications, and produced by logical tools and methods. The papers contained in this volume cover the following topics: 1. Logic programming 2. Epistemic logics 3. Theorem proving 4. Non-monotonic reasoning 5. Non-standard logics 6. Knowledge representation 7. Higher order logics We would like to warmly thank the authors, the invited speakers, the m- bers of the program committee, and the additional reviewers listed below. They all have made these proceedings possible and ensured their quality.
by Roberto Cencioni At the Lisbon Summit in March 2000, European heads of state and government set a new goal for the European Union — to become the most competitive knowled- based society in the world by 2010. As part of this objective, ICT (information and communication technologies) services should become available for every citizen, and for all schools, homes and businesses. The book you have in front of you is about Semantic Web technology and law. Law is something omnipresent; all citizens — at some points in their lives — have to deal with it. In addition, law involves a large group of professionals, and is a mul- billion business world wide. Information technology is important because it that can improve citizens’ interaction with law, as well as improve legal professionals’ work environment. Legal professionals dedicate a significant amount of their time to finding, reading, analyzing and synthesizing information in order to take decisions, and prepare advice and trials, among other tasks. As part of the “Semantic-Based Knowledge and Content Systems” Strategic Objective, the European Commission is funding projects to construct technology to make the Semantic Web vision come true. 1 The articles in this book are related to two current foci of the Strategic Objective : • Knowledge acquisition and modelling, capturing knowledge from raw information and multimedia content in webs and other distributed repositories to turn poorly structured information into machi- processable knowledge.
