Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
419392 Discrete Applied Mathematics 2013 17 Pages PDF
Abstract

The closure system on a finite set is a unifying concept in logic programming, relational databases and knowledge systems. It can also be presented in the terms of finite lattices, and the tools of economic description of a finite lattice have long existed in lattice theory. We present this approach by defining the DD-basis and introducing the concept of an ordered direct basis   of an implicational system. A direct basis of a closure operator, or an implicational system, is a set of implications that allows one to compute the closure of an arbitrary set by a single iteration. This property is preserved by the DD-basis at the cost of following a prescribed order in which implications will be attended. In particular, using an ordered direct basis allows to optimize the forward chaining procedure   in logic programming that uses the Horn fragment of propositional logic. One can extract the DD-basis from any direct unit basis ΣΣ in time polynomial in the size s(Σ)s(Σ), and it takes only linear time of the cardinality of the DD-basis to put it into a proper order. We produce examples of closure systems on a 66-element set, for which the canonical basis of Duquenne and Guigues is not ordered direct.

Related Topics
Physical Sciences and Engineering Computer Science Computational Theory and Mathematics
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