A multi-agent cooperative reasoning system for amalgamated knowledge bases

We propose a multi-agent cooperative reasoning system for amalgamated knowledge bases. A multi-agent cooperation environment, where inconsistency is allowed, can be presented by an amalgamated knowledge base. Our reasoning method is an extension of the magic sets technique [2] for amalgamated knowledge bases, augmented with the capabilities of handling amalgamated atoms. Through rewriting a given amalgamated knowledge base, our method offers the advantages associated with top-down as well as bottom-up evaluation. Especially, our reasoning method makes unnecessary the expensive reductant rules of inference introduced in [5], and the translation of a given amalgamated knowledge base into its regular representation as in [1]. We consider how to make the bottom-up computation for amalgamated atoms, describe the extended magic sets translation rules, and discuss some related problems.