Redundancy Reduction Algorithms in Rule-Based Knowledge Bases

Redundancy rules in knowledge bases will affect the reasoning process of knowledge bases. And they will take up a lot of unnecessary memory space. So the notions of redundancy rules are briefly introduced. Meanwhile they are classified into four types. This paper studies the redundancy rules based on propositional logic and presents the reduction algorithms of four kinds of redundancy rules. They are equivalent redundancy rules, implication redundancy rules and cycle redundancy rules in explicit redundancy rules and condition redundancy rules in implicit redundancy rules. The reduction in this paper optimizes the structure of rule-based knowledge bases. And it also improves the efficiency of time and space of the reasoning on knowledge bases.