Rule-Based Reasoning
Reasoning is a mental process from a knowledge base (KB) to a new query (including a proposition, a new action, a question, a process, a program etc.) and particularly, it is the action of thinking about something in a logical way.
There are different forms of logical reasoning:
• Inductive reasoning: To build general theories (knowledge) from particular observations (facts).
• Deductive reasoning: To use general theories (knowledge) on particular cases to infer new facts.
• Abductive reasoning: To use general theories and incomplete observations to get the most plausible conclusion.
In the field of knowledge graphs and semantic web, reasoning (including deductive, inductive and abductive) is a process from an OWL knowledge base to a new query. By “Symbolic Knowledge Representation”, knowledge can be represented in machines to allow the computation of deduction. Also, by a “formal semantics” we can interpret the formal representation in terms of what it means, and by “data structures” and “algorithms” we can manipulate the knowledge representation to automate reasoning.
Finally, by a good “knowledge engineering” we lead to use these techniques adequately in concrete use cases.