Taxonomic Reasoning

In formalizing knowledge for common sense reasoning, one often needs to partition some domain. An instance of this from the Blocks World is the statement "All blocks are either held, on the table, or on another block." Although we can write this axiom in predicate calculus or in clause form for input to a theorem prover, such representations are highly space inefficient. In this paper we present a generalized clause form that allows for the compact representation of arbitrary partitions, along with a set of corresponding inference rules. Additionally, a theorem prover implementing these rules is described that demonstrates their utility with certain kinds of common sense rule bases.