Synonymous theories and knowledge representations in answer set programming (Q414849)

This work introduces the concept of synonymy and elaborates on it. In a first concise part, six general desiderata for synonymous theories in (possibly non-montonic) knowledge representation are given. The article then focuses on the particular formalism of first-order theories under the equilibrium (or answer set) semantics and develops a theory of synonymy for it. The Beth property, a condition under which two definitions of definability are equivalent for a logic and and which should allow for generalizing the obtained theory also to other formalisms, plays a central role. Finally, the authors also provide a case study in which the developed theory is used for showing that two formalizations of descriptions of dynamic systems are equivalent, which is in itself a nontrivial result.