Abduction with Hypotheses Confirmation

Abduction can be seen as the formal inference corresponding to human hypothesis making. It typically has the purpose of explaining some given observation. In classical abduction, hypotheses could be made on events that may have occurred in the past. In general, abductive reasoning can be used to generate hypotheses about events possibly occurring in the future (forecasting), or may suggest further investigations that will confirm or disconfirm the hypotheses made in a previous step (as in scientific reasoning). We propose an operational framework based on Abductive Logic Programming, extending existing frameworks in many respects, including accommodating dynamic observations and hypothesis confirmation.