Negation and Negative Information in the W3C Resource Description Framework

Carlos Augusto Isaac Piló Viegas Damásio, Anastasia Analyti, Grigoris Antoniou, Gerd R. Wagner

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

The concept of negation plays a special rolein non-classical logics and also in knowledge representationformalisms where negative information has to betaken into account on par with positive information. Inthe tradition of mathematical logic, there is a generalpreference to consider positive information as basic andtreat negative information as derived. This has also beenthe approach in relational databases, in normal logicprograms, and is now again the approach in the ResourceDescription Framework (RDF) that has recently been proposedas a general language for representing propositionalinformation on the Web by the World Wide Web Committee(W3C). However, as we argue in this article, anypractical knowledge representation formalism, especiallyfor the Web, has to be able to deal with knowledge itemsinvolving partial predicates for which negative informationis as informative as positive information, and which mayhave truth-value gaps and truth-value clashes. This kindof knowledge is best represented and processed with thehelp of the two negations of partial logic, one expressingexplicit falsity and the other one expressing non-truth.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)25-34
Number of pages10
JournalAnnals of Mathematics Computing Teleinformatics
Volume2
Issue number1
Publication statusPublished - 2004

Keywords

  • RDF
  • negation
  • partial logic

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