Translating Parallel Circumscription into Disjunctive Logic Programming

The semantics of disjunctive logic programs is based on minimal models. This makes atoms appearing in a disjunctive program false by default. In many cases this is highly desirable, but certain problems become awkward to formalize if all atoms are subject to minimization. Lifschitz’s parallel circumscription enables the use of varying and fixed atoms which eases the task of knowledge presentation in certain cases. In this paper we show how parallel circumscription can be embedded into disjunctive logic programming using a linear translation.