Minimal Founded Semantics for Disjunctive Logic Programming

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new semantics for disjunctive logic programming and deductive databases. The semantics, called minimal founded, generalizes stable model semantics for normal (i.e. non disjunctive) programs but differs from disjunctive stable model semantics (the extension of stable model semantics for disjunctive programs). Compared with disjunctive stable model semantics, the minimal founded semantics seems to be, in some case, more intuitive, it gives meaning to programs which are meaningless under stable model semantics and it is not harder to compute. We study the expressive power of the semantics and show that for general disjunctive datalog programs it has the same power of disjunctive stable model semantics. We also present a variation of the minimal founded semantics, called strongly founded which on stratified programs coincide with the perfect model semantics.KeywordsMinimal ModelStable ModelModel SemanticExpressive PowerPredicate SymbolThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.