Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference (KR 2008)

Knowledge representation and reasoning (KR&R) lies at the heart of artificial intelligence research and modern information technology. The highly ambitious goal of the field is to provide computational methods for effectively storing, retrieving, and exploiting human knowledge. It includes representing and reasoning about beliefs, goals, preferences, and actions; it includes models of argumentation, belief change, merging, inconsistency handling, and nonmonotonic reasoning; it also covers topics such as time, space, motion, ontologies, and building useful knowledge-based systems. The Knowledge Representation (KR) conferences have established themselves as the leading forum for timely, in-depth presentation of progress in the theory and principles underlying the representation and computational manipulation of knowledge. The papers in this volume have passed a stringent review process and cover a wide range of topics, including description logics and ontologies, planning and reasoning about action, and belief change / inconsistency handling and argumentation / nonmonotonic reasoning / logic programming. In addition, we have collections of excellent papers on agents and multiagent systems, approximate reasoning and query answering, causality, preferences, and temporal and spatial reasoning. These proceedings are an essential reference volume for researchers and students interested in a detailed view of this key research area.ou