MULTIVALUED LOGIC PROGRAMMING-SEMANTICS - AN ALGEBRAIC APPROACH

In this paper we introduce the notion of join-irreducibility in the co ntext of bilattices and present a procedural semantics for bilattice b ased logic programs which uses, as its basis, the join-irreducible ele ments of the knowledge part of the bilattice. The join-irreducible ele ments in a bilattice represent the ''primitive bits'' of information p resent within the system. In bilattices which have the descending chai n property in their knowledge ordering, these elements provide a small representative set completely characterizing the bilattice. The overa ll complexity of the inference systems based on such bilattices can th us be reduced by restricting attention to the join-irreducible element s.