Labor is a physiological event involving a sequential, integrated set of changes within the myometrium, deciduas, and uterine cervix that occur gradually over a period of days to weeks. Biochemical connective tissue changes in the uterine cervix appear to precede uterine contractions and cervical dilation, and all of these events usually occur before rupture of the fetal membranes. In other wor...

This paper extends the notion of prime implicates to first order logic formulas without equality which are assumed to be in Skolem Conjunctive Normal Form. Using the extended notions of consensus and subsumption it is shown that the consensus-subsumption algorithm for computing prime implicates well known for propositional formulas can be conditionally lifted to first order formulas.

Knowledge compilation is a common technique for propositional logic knowledge bases. A given knowledge base is transformed into a normal form, for which queries can be answered efficiently. This precompilation step is expensive, but it only has to be performed once. We apply this technique to knowledge bases defined in the Description Logic ALC. We discuss an efficient satisfiability test as we...

Useful equivalence-preserving operations based on antilinks are described. These operations eliminate a potentially large number of subsumed paths in a negation normal form formula. Those anti-links that directly indicate the presence of subsumed paths are characterized. These operations are useful for prime implicant/implicate algorithms because most of the computational effort in computing th...

Knowledge compilation is a common technique for propositional logic knowledge bases. The idea is to transform a given knowledge base into a special normal form ([MR03],[DH05]), for which queries can be answered efficiently. This precompilation step is very expensive but it only has to be performed once. We propose to apply this technique to knowledge bases defined in Description Logics. For thi...