ECAI 2004 Conference Paper

A semantics for abstraction

Chiara Ghidini, Fausto Giunchiglia

The goal of this paper is to propose a model-theoretic formalization of abstraction, where abstraction is modeled as two representations, the ground and the abstract representation, modeling the same phenomenon at different levels of detail. Using the framework of Local Models Semantics, the ground and abstract representations are modeled as two sets of (local) first order models, while the relations holding between them are captured by an appropriate ``compatibility relation''. The tuning of the compatibility relation allows for the definition of the many different kinds of abstraction.

Keywords: Knowledge Representation, Common-Sense Reasoning, Context-based reasoning, theories of abstraction

Citation: Chiara Ghidini, Fausto Giunchiglia: A semantics for abstraction. In R.López de Mántaras and L.Saitta (eds.): ECAI2004, Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2004, pp.338-342.

ECAI-2004 is organised by the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI) and hosted by the Universitat Politècnica de València on behalf of Asociación Española de Inteligencia Artificial (AEPIA) and Associació Catalana d'Intel-ligència Artificial (ACIA).