What, many people ask, will happen when this huge mass of classical logic meets its first inconsistncy? Surely, once you have one staement that A and another somewhere on the web that not A, then doesn't the whole system fall apart? Surely, then you can deduce anything you want?
This fear of course is quite valid - or would be if all assertions in the whole world were regarded as bing on equal footing. Some imagine that an RDF parser will simply search all XML documents on the web for any facts, and add them to a massive set of belived assertions. This is not how realisic systems will actually work.
On the web, a fact may be asserted in an expression. That expression may be part fo a formula. The formula may ivolve negation, and may invove quotation. The whole formula is found by parsing some document . There is no a priori reason to believe any document on the web. The reason to believe a document will be found in some information (metadata) about the document. That metadata may be an endosement of the document - another RDF statement, which in turn was found another document, and so on.
[@@need picture here]
A real system may work backwards or forwards (or both). I would call working forwards a system which is given a configuartion page to work from which in turn points to other pages which in turn are used as valid data. I would call working backwards a system which, when looking for an answer to a query, looks at a gloal index to find any document at all which mentions a given term. It then searches thes documents turned up for answers to the query. Only when it has found an answer does t check back to see whether the data can be deriveded directly or indirectly from sources it has been set up to trust.
Digital sgnature (see trust) of course adds a notion of secuirty to the whole process. The first step is that a document is not endorsed without giving the checksum it had when believed. The second step is to secify more powerful rules of the form
"whatever any document says so long it is signed with key 57832498437".
In prcatice, particular authroities are trusted only for specific purposed. The semantic web must support this. You must be able to restrict the information believed along the lines of,
"whatever any document says of the form xxxx is a meber of W3C so long as it is signed wiht key 32457934759432".
for example
"whatever any document says of the form "a is an employee of IBM" so long as it is signed by with key 3213123098129".
There is a choice here, and I am not sure right now which appeals to me most. One is to say precicely,
"whatever any document says of the form xxxx is a member of W3C so long as it is signed with key 32457934759432".
The other is to say,
"whatever is of form xxxx and can be inferred from information signed with key 32457934759432"
In the first case, we are making an arbitrary requirement for a statement to be phrased in a particular way. This seems unnecessarily bureaucratic, and more difficult to treat constently. Normally we like to be able to replace any set of forumlae with another set which can be deduced from it. However, in this case we have to preserve the actual form in case we need to match it against a pattern. This is very messy.
In the second case, we fall prey to the inconsistency trap. Once any pair of conflicting statements can be deduced from information signed with a given key, then anything can be deduced from information signed with the key: the key is completely broken. Of course, only that key is broken, so a trust system can remove any reason it has to trust that key. However, the attacked system may not realize what has happened before it has been convinced that the sun rises in the west.
Is there a way to limit the domain of trust in a key while allowing inmformation to be processed in a consistent way throughout the system? Yes - maybe - there are many. Each KR system which uses a limited logic does do in order (partly) to solve this problem. We just qulaify "can be inferred" be the type of inference rules which may be used. This means the generic proof engine eitehr has to work though a reified version of the rules or it has to know the sets - incorporate each proof engine. Maybe we only need one.
Tortoise: What's the time, Achilles?
Achilles: Five past ten, my friend. [They chat for a minute]
Tortoise: What is the time, Achilles?
Achilles: Six minutes past ten, Mr. Toroise.
Tortoise: But Achilles, you just told me just a minute ago it was five minutes past ten. How can I ever believe you again?
Time-varying information is one cause of apparent contradiction. People and documents change status. How does one base inference on information which may be out of date?
One part of this is to put explicit or implcit expry dates on everything. Whenever a server sends resource to an HTTP client, it can give an expiry date. The client can track this, and ensure that all deductions from that document are cancelled when the date arrives, unless a more recent copy can be optained which says the same thing. In human language you might say "It is rainy" but on the semantic web that woudl be exported in a fully qualified way, more like "at Mon Jan 24 09:41:06 EST 2000 the measurement guage 5 at Dubin Airport read rain as having fallen in the last hour". (A fuzzy system would conclude "Dublin is wet" and a clasic logic system "at least once it rained at at least one place in Dublin"!)
I understand [Lehrmann, SW meeting in DC] (sp?) that the KIF folks developed a complete vocabulary for time-variance.
Another tchnique is to make any looseness which exists in the real system visible. Instead of saying
Any employee of any member orgainzation of W3C may register
you say formally to the registration engine
Any person who was some time in the last 2 months an employy of an organization which was som etim ein the last 2 montsh a W3C member may register.
In other words, if an organization were to drop its membership, the system doesn't have to support propagating that information instantly.
I think there will be time-aware reasoning systems, and time-unaware raesoning systems which are fed data with expiry dates and whose results are used within the intersection period of the validity periods of the incomming data. Indeed, time-aware systems may contain nested time-unaware systems, and probably vice-versa.