IN PROLOG-TYPE KNOWLEDGE BASES

School of Management Syracuse Un i vers i ty Syracuse, NY 13244-2130 Because of the i ncremental and piecemeal nature of its construction, logical inconsistency and redundancy can be inadvertently built into a knowledge base. This paper discusses a methodology for analyzing the c ontents of a PROLOG-type knowledge base and fct eliminating inconsistent and redundant logical elements. It introduces a graphical representation, t he goal-facts network, of the logic required to infer a goal and describes the identification of inconsistency in that network. Two alternatives, Boolean algebra and the Karnaugh map, are presented as tools to identify and to eliminate redundancy.