Editorial introduction to the special issue

Abstract

The information available to intelligent agents is often uncertain, inconsistent and incomplete. It is then crucially important to develop logics for uncertainty to achieve different complex reasoning tasks. Uncertainty is present in many applications and may be represented using different frameworks: plausibility orderings, probability theory frameworks, argumentation systems, etc. This special issue gathers five contributions that cover different aspects of reasoning under uncertainty using non classical logics. Four of the five papers are fully revised and extended versions of contributions initially presented at the Fifth International Conference on Scalable Uncertainty Management (SUM’11) The two first papers concern extensions of logic-based programming languages to deal with uncertain information. The paper by Pere Pardo, Lluis Godo entitled “t-DeLP: an argumentation-based Temporal Defeasible Logic Programming framework” deals with handling temporal information using defeasible logic. The proposed framework, called t-DeLP, allows to extend argumentation-based defeasible logic in order to represent temporal processes. The idea is to associate temporal information to literals and to define temporal logic programs are sets of basic temporal facts and (strict or defeasible) durative rules. Concepts of argumentation systems, such as the one of undefeated arguments, are redefined in this t-DeLP framework. A procedure for determining a set of warranted literals is proposed. The paper also discusses rational properties satisfied by the t-DeLP framework. The paper by Georg Gottlob,Thomas Lukasiewicz, Maria Vanina Martinez and Gerardo I. Simari entitled “Query Answering under Probabilistic Uncertainty in Datalog+/ Ontologies” concerns an extension of Datalog+/− to deal with uncertainty. The authors use Markov Logic Networks to provide a probabilistic semantics for the probabilistic Datalog+/−. They provide scalable and sound algorithms for