Cartesian Situations and Knowledge Decomposition in the Situation Calculus

Ronald P. A. Petrick

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

We formalize the notion of a Cartesian situation in the situation calculus, a property that imposes strong structural conditions on the configuration of a set of possible worlds. Focusing on action theories that use the Scherl and Levesque account of knowledge and action, we show how Cartesian situations give rise to a set of decomposition properties for simplifying epistemic formulae (in particular, certain disjunctive and existentially quantified formulae) into equivalent components that only mention fluent literals. Moreover, we describe certain expressive classes of action theories that preserve the Cartesian property through action. This work also offers the possibility of identifying action theories that can be compiled into alternative accounts of knowledge that have similar representational restrictions, but do not use possible worlds.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 11th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR-2008)
PublisherAAAI Press
Pages629-639
Number of pages11
ISBN (Print)978-1-57735-384-3
Publication statusPublished - 1 Sept 2008

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