Nested Epistemic Logic Programs

Nested logic programs and epistemic logic programs are two important extensions of answer set programming. However, the relationship between these two formalisms is rarely explored. In this paper we first introduce the epistemic HT-logic, and then propose a more general extension of logic programs called nested epistemic logic programs. The semantics of this extension – named equilibrium views – is defined on the basis of the epistemic HT-logic. We prove that equilibrium view semantics extends both the answer sets of nested logic programs and the world views of epistemic logic programs. Therefore, our work establishes a unifying framework for both nested logic programs and epistemic logic programs. Furthermore, we also provide a characterization of the strong equivalence of two nested epistemic logic programs.