Declarative Belief Set Merging Using Merging Plans

The authors present a declarative framework for belief set merging tasks over (possibly heterogeneous) knowledge bases, where belief sets are sets of literals. The framework is designed generically for flexible deployment to a range of applications, and allows to specify complex merging tasks in tree-structured merging plans, whose leaves are the possible belief sets of the knowledge bases that are processed using merging operators. A prototype is implemented in MELD (MErging Library for Dlvhex) on top of the dlvhex system for HEX-programs, which are non-monotonic logic programs with access to external sources.