Validation and Refinement versus Revision

This paper is a first work on the link between two fields: validation and refinement in knowledge base systems and revision in knowledge representation. The validation evaluates knowledge base quality; among the criterion which can define this quality an interesting one is coherency. The coherency of a set of rules can be viewed as the potential consistency of this set of rules with respect to every possible input. Refinement is a way to modify an incoherent knowledge base in order to restore its coherency. A revision operation is an inference relation, which is defined in order to reason under inconsistency, it provides a way to select rules to delete in order to restore the consistency. In the two fields, usually the initial knowledge base is consistent and the inconsistency can only come from some input on which a deduction must be done. This paper underlines the link between refinement and revision by comparing consistency to coherency and then by defining an inference relation for