
Chapter 6
Ontologies and Rules
This chapter introduces “rules” as an alternative way of modeling knowledge
which complements the means of specifying knowledge we have already learned
about. In the broadest sense, a rule could be any statement which says that
a certain conclusion must be valid whenever a certain premise is satisfied,
i.e. any statement that could be read as a sentence of the form “if . . . then
. . . ”
1
We will soon confine ourselves to concrete types of rules that will
be defined more accurately. Yet it is worth noting that the term “ rule” as
such refers rather to a knowledge modeling paradigm than to a particular
formalism or language. ...