Combining Default Logic Databases

During the past decade, it has become increasingly clear that the future generation of large-scale knowledge bases will consist, not of one single isolated knowledge base, but a multiplicity of specialized knowledge bases that contain knowledge about different domains of expertise. These knowledge bases will work cooperatively, pooling together their varied bodies of knowledge, so as to be able to solve complex problems that no single knowledge base, by itself, would have been able to address successfully. In any such situation, inconsistencies are bound to arise. In this paper, we address the question: "Suppose we have a set of knowledge bases, KB1, …, KBn, each of which uses default logic as the formalism for knowledge representation, and a set of integrity constraints IC. What knowledge base constitutes an acceptable combination of KB1, …, KBn?"