Measuring Inconsistency through Minimal Proofs

Measuring the degree of inconsistency of a knowledge base provides important context information for making easier inconsistency handling. In this paper, we propose a new fine-grained measure to quantify the degree of inconsistency of propositional formulae. Our inconsistency measure uses in an original way the minimal proofs to characterize the responsibility of each formula in the global inconsistency. We give an extension of such measure to quantify the inconsistency of the whole base. Furthermore, we show that our measure satisfies the important properties characterizing an intuitive inconsistency measure. Finally, we address the problem of restoring consistency using an inconsistency measure.