How to Produce Information About a Given Entity Using Automated Deduction Methods

The standard method to retrieve information can be formally defined as follows. To ask a query, one gives the properties of the entities to be retrieved, and the answer is the set of all the entities that satisfy the query. Another method, is to ask the overall information about a given entity, and the answer is the corresponding information. An example of the first kind of query is: ''what are the drugs that contain a given molecule?'', an example of the second kind is: ''what are the properties of a given drug?''. This latter method has deserved very few researches though it has great potential practical applications. However, it raises many non trivial issues. The first one is to find a precise definition of the fact that a piece of information ''is about'' a given entity. We recall the formal definition that have been proposed in formal classical logic, and the main properties that follow from this definition. The second one is to adapt existing automated deduction methods to compute this new kind of answer, using either deduction or abduction techniques. Finally, we present potential extensions to our definition and guidelines for automated deduction strategies.

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