In [Hitzler and Wendt 2002, 2005], a new methodology has been proposed which allows to derive uniform characterizations of different declarative semantics for logic programs with negation. One result from this work is that the well-founded semantics can formally be understood as a stratified version of the Fitting (or Kripke-Kleene) semantics. The constructions leading to this result, however, show a certain asymmetry which is not readily understood. We will study this situation here with the result that we will obtain a coherent picture of relations between different semantics for normal logic programs.
Loyer, Spyratos and Stamate, in @cite_11 , presented a parametrized approach to different semantics. It allows to substitute the preference for falsehood by preference for truth in the stable and well-founded semantics, but uses entirely different means than presented here. Its purpose is also different --- while we focus on the strenghtening of the mathematical foundations for the field, the work in @cite_11 is motivated by the need to deal with open vs. closed world assumption in some application settings. The exact relationship between their approach and ours remains to be worked out.
@cite_11
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The different semantics that can be assigned to a logic program correspond to different assumptions made concerning the atoms that are rule heads and whose logical values cannot be inferred from the rules. For example, the well founded semantics corresponds to the assumption that every such atom is false, while the Kripke-Kleene semantics corresponds to the assumption that every such atom is unknown. In this paper, we propose to unify and extend this assumption-based approach by introducing parameterized semantics for logic programs. The parameter holds the value that one assumes for all rule heads whose logical values cannot be inferred from the rules. We work within multi-valued logic with bilattice structure, and we consider the class of logic programs defined by Fitting.Following Fitting's approach, we define an operator that allows us to compute the parameterized semantic, and to compare and combine semantics obtained for different values of the parameter. We show that our approach captures and extends the usual semantics of conventional logic programs thereby unifying their computation.