The Strong Semantics for Logic Programs

Recently, the well-founded semantics of a logic program P has been strengthened to the well-founded semantics-by-case (WF C ) and then again to the extended well-founded semantics (WF E ). An important concept used in both WF C and WF E is that of derived rules. We extend the notion of derived rules by adding a new type of derivation and define the strong semantics of P, which has the following important property, known as the GCWA-property: if an atom p = false in all minimal models of P, then p = false in the strong semantics of P. In general, the WF C -semantics and the WF E -semantics do not have the GCWA-property. If we first apply the WF E -semantics to P and then apply the strong semantics to a suitably simplified form of P based on its WF E -semantics, then the resulting semantics is stronger than the WF E -semantics and has the GCWA-property.