The Role of Abduction in Internet-Based Applications

Abstract

The Internet is a jewel box of information. Accordingly, research on an inference system interacting with information on the Internet is quite important to building an intelligent inference system. The main reason for this is that if we use information on the WWW, it is not necessary to build a large knowledge base by ourselves. Instead, missing or brand-new information can be searched in the Internet and then added when it is necessary. From this viewpoint, we are now doing research on an integrated reasoning system (Decision Support system for the Internet Users (DSIU)) involving knowledge acquisition from the Internet, knowledge selection, knowledge formation (integration), reasoning, and evaluation of the results of the reasoning [2]. The Internet includes a huge amount of knowledge and likely includes inconsistent information and errors. Moreover, some information sets may be missing. As a result, it becomes necessary to deal with an incomplete knowledge base.