A nonmonotonic observation logic

Abstract

A variant of Reiter's default logic is proposed as a logic for reasoning with (defeasible) observations. Traditionally, default rules are assumed to represent generic information and the facts are assumed to represent specific information about the situation, but in this paper, the specific information derives from defeasible observations represented by (normal free) default rules, and the facts represent (hard) background knowledge. Whenever the evidence underlying some observation is more refined than the evidence underlying another observation, this is modelled by means of a priority between the default rules representing the observations. We thus arrive at an interpretation of prioritized normal free default logic as an observation logic, and we propose a semantics for this observation logic. Finally, we discuss how the proposed observation logic relates to the multiple extension problem and the problem of sensor fusion.