Merging in the Horn Fragment

Abstract

Belief merging is a central operation within the field of belief change and addresses the problem of combining multiple, possibly mutually inconsistent knowledge bases into a single, consistent one. A current research trend in belief change is concerned with representation theorems tailored to fragments of logic, in particular Horn logic. Hereby, the goal is to guarantee that the result of the change operations stays within the fragment under consideration. While several such results have been obtained for Horn revision and Horn contraction, merging of Horn theories has been neglected so far. In this article, we provide a novel representation theorem for Horn merging by strengthening the standard merging postulates. Moreover, we present concrete Horn merging operators satisfying all postulates.