Any-time knowledge revision

Abstract

We propose and experiment a practical multi-level approach to maintain contradiction-free knowledge when some incoming additional information that can contradict the preexisting knowledge must be taken into account. The approach implements an any-time strategy that triggers successive reasoning paradigms ranging from credulous to computationally more intensive forms of skepticism about conflicting information. It makes use of recent dramatic computational progress in constraint satisfaction techniques for finite domains and Boolean-related search and reasoning.