Forgetting and Conflict Resolving in Disjunctive Logic Programming

We establish a declarative theory of forgetting for disjunctive logic programs. The suitability of this theory is justified by a number of desirable properties. In particular, one of our results shows that our notion of forgetting is completely captured by the classical forgetting. A transformation-based algorithm is also developed for computing the result of forgetting. We also provide an analysis of computational complexity. As an application of our approach, a fairly general framework for resolving conflicts in inconsistent knowledge bases represented by disjunctive logic programs is defined. The basic idea of our framework is to weaken the preferences of each agent by forgetting certain knowledge that causes inconsistency. In particular, we show how to use the notion of forgetting to provide an elegant solution for preference elicitation in disjunctive logic programming.