English

Primal logic of information

Logic in Computer Science 2023-07-14 v1 Logic

Abstract

Primal logic arose in access control; it has a remarkably efficient (linear time) decision procedure for its entailment problem. But primal logic is a general logic of information. In the realm of arbitrary items of information (infons), conjunction, disjunction, and implication may seem to correspond (set-theoretically) to union, intersection, and relative complementation. But, while infons are closed under union, they are not closed under intersection or relative complementation. It turns out that there is a systematic transformation of propositional intuitionistic calculi to the original (propositional) primal calculi; we call it Flatting. We extend Flatting to quantifier rules, obtaining arguably the right quantified primal logic, QPL. The QPL entailment problem is exponential-time complete, but it is polynomial-time complete in the case, of importance to applications (at least to access control), where the number of quantifiers is bounded.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2307.06454,
  title  = {Primal logic of information},
  author = {Yuri Gurevich and Andreas Blass},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.06454},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T11:28:57.110Z