Belief logic programming: Uncertainty reasoning with correlation of evidence

Abstract

Belief Logic Programming (BLP) is a novel form of quantitative logic programming in the presence of uncertain and inconsistent information, which was designed to be able to combine and correlate evidence obtained from non-independent information sources. BLP has non-monotonic semantics based on the concepts of belief combination functions and is inspired by Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence. Most importantly, unlike the previous efforts to integrate uncertainty and logic programming, BLP can correlate structural information contained in rules and provides more accurate certainty estimates. The results are illustrated via simple, yet realistic examples of rule-based Web service integration. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.