A Multilevel Knowledge Representation in Prolog of Strategies for Combining Modules

Authors: M. Bieliková and P. Návrat

Reference: 7th Int. Conf. Artificial Intelligence and Information-control Systems of Robots, pp.155-168, 1997, World Scientific.

Contents:

1. Problem Area and Goal
2. Reflection
3. Design of a Multilevel Logic Program
4. Combining Modules in Multilevel Logic Programming
• Union of Modules
• Closed Modules
• Modules with Imported Predicates
• Contextual Programming
• Inheritance
5. Structuring Meta-Level Knowledge
6. Conclusions

Abstract: The research was motivated by the need to represent knowledge (when written in Prolog) in a way that would retain its inherent structure. Our approach attempts to offer means of abstraction for structuring logic programs according to both generality levels and to knowledge content, i.e. meta-levels. Using the notion of a modular logic program, we define a special reflection mechanism which establishes connections between modules at a given level and a level above. We describe various ways of combining of modules. We propose defining meta-knowledge in separate modules, with each module defining one particular strategy. Another option is dividing meta-knowledge that defines one strategy into several modules at one level, and defining a way of combining them.

Keywords: module, reflection, meta-interpretation, multilevel logic program, Prolog, contextual programming, closed modules, union of modules, inheritance.

PS version (200K file, 14 pages) together with a GZ version (47K file) is available.

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