An architecture for selective forgetting

Some knowledge based systems will have to deal with increasing amount of knowledge. In order to avoid memory overflow, it is necessary to clean memory of useless data. Here is a first step toward an intelligent automatic forgetting scheme. The problem of the close relation between forgetting and inferring is addressed, and a general solution is proposed. It is implemented as invalidation operators for reasoning maintenance system dependency graphs. This results in a general architecture for selective forgetting which is presented in the framework of the Sachem system.