Adding Context to Knowledge and Action Bases

TL;DR

This paper extends Knowledge and Action Bases (KABs) by incorporating contextual information, enabling more dynamic and environment-aware reasoning while maintaining decidability under certain conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for adding context to KABs, including environment-driven context changes and relevance-based TBox assertions, extending existing verification results.

Findings

Verification remains decidable under run-boundedness.

Enriched KABs can model environment-dependent dynamics.

Extended mu-calculus verification applies to context-aware systems.

Abstract

Knowledge and Action Bases (KABs) have been recently proposed as a formal framework to capture the dynamics of systems which manipulate Description Logic (DL) Knowledge Bases (KBs) through action execution. In this work, we enrich the KAB setting with contextual information, making use of different context dimensions. On the one hand, context is determined by the environment using context-changing actions that make use of the current state of the KB and the current context. On the other hand, it affects the set of TBox assertions that are relevant at each time point, and that have to be considered when processing queries posed over the KAB. Here we extend to our enriched setting the results on verification of rich temporal properties expressed in mu-calculus, which had been established for standard KABs. Specifically, we show that under a run-boundedness condition, verification stays decidable.