Object-Oriented Knowledge Bases in Logic Programming

Abstract

We describe the axiomatic content of a biology knowledge base that poses both theoretical and empirical challenges for knowledge intensive reasoning. The knowledge base is organized hierarchically as a set of classes with necessary and sufficient properties. The class hierarchy also contains disjointness axioms. The relations have domain and range constraints, are organized into a hierarchy, can have cardinality constraints and can have composition axioms stated for them. The necessary and sufficient properties of classes induce general graphs for which there are no known decidable reasoners. The knowledge content is practically motivated by an education application and has been extensively tested to be of high quality.