VALIDATION OF FIRST‐ORDER RULE‐BASED SYSTEMS1

Knowledge base validation and knowledge base refinement aim to help the expert to improve an existing knowledge base. They deal with the final knowledge acquisition phase and rely on a quality measurement of an existing knowledge base. We present our approach to knowledge base refinement, which is based on results in the domain of knowledge base validation. Our approach is based on a general consistency definition of a knowledge base and on a study of causes of knowledge base inconsistency. Our approach relies significantly on a differentiation of sure and expert knowledge in the knowledge base. We have implemented a system that has two phases: one computational phase decides on the consistency of a knowledge base, and, if necessary, a second phase helps the expert to interactively update the knowledge base. We present some related work in the domain. We illustrate the use of our system with an example.