English

FO(C): A Knowledge Representation Language of Causality

Logic in Computer Science 2014-05-12 v2 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Cause-effect relations are an important part of human knowledge. In real life, humans often reason about complex causes linked to complex effects. By comparison, existing formalisms for representing knowledge about causal relations are quite limited in the kind of specifications of causes and effects they allow. In this paper, we present the new language C-Log, which offers a significantly more expressive representation of effects, including such features as the creation of new objects. We show how C-Log integrates with first-order logic, resulting in the language FO(C). We also compare FO(C) with several related languages and paradigms, including inductive definitions, disjunctive logic programming, business rules and extensions of Datalog.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1405.1833,
  title  = {FO(C): A Knowledge Representation Language of Causality},
  author = {Bart Bogaerts and Joost Vennekens and Marc Denecker and Jan Van den Bussche},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1405.1833},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP)

R2 v1 2026-06-22T04:08:52.819Z