A Comparative Study of Well-Founded Semantics for Disjunctive Logic Programs

Abstract

Much work has been done on extending the well-founded semantics to general disjunctive logic programs and various approaches have been proposed. However, no consensus has been reached about which semantics is the most intended. In this paper we look at disjunctive well-founded reasoning from different angles. We show that there is an intuitive form of the well-founded reasoning in disjunctive logic programming which can be equivalently characterized by several different approaches including program transformations, argumentation, unfounded sets (and resolution-like procedure). We also provide a bottom-up procedure for this semantics. The significance of this work is not only in clarifying the relationship among different approaches, but also in providing novel arguments in favor of our semantics.