Querying and Reasoning in Paraconsistent Rule-Object Languages with Inheritance Expressions

Inheritance has intensively been investigated during the past decades in object-oriented programming and knowledge representation and reasoning areas. In the paper we focus on recently introduced inheritance expressions that allow one to represent dynamic concept hierarchies as well as fuse and disambiguate beliefs acquired by the objects involved. We focus on querying and reasoning about inheritance expressions using a four-valued paraconsistent formalism that has been developed over the last ten years. In particular, we show that querying inheritance expressions and formulas can be efficiently implemented. In addition, we provide tableaux for general reasoning purposes. Complexity of the investigated tools is also analyzed.