F-logic

F-logic (frame logic) is a knowledge representation and ontology language. F-logic combines the advantages of conceptual modeling with object-oriented, frame-based languages and offers a declarative, compact and simple syntax, as well as the well-defined semantics of a logic-based language. Features include, among others, object identity, complex objects, inheritance, polymorphism, query methods, encapsulation. F-logic stands in the same relationship to object-oriented programming as classical relational calculus stands to relational database programming. F-logic was developed by Michael Kifer at Stony Brook University and Georg Lausen at the University of Mannheim. F-logic was originally developed for deductive databases, but is now most frequently used for semantic technologies, especially the semantic web. F-logic is considered as one of the formalisms for ontologies, but description logic (DL) is more popular and accepted, as is the DL-based OWL. A development environment for F-logic was developed in the NeOn project and is also used in a range of applications for information integration, question answering and semantic search. Prior to the version 4 of Protégé ontology editor, F-Logic is supported as one of the two kinds of ontology. The frame syntax of the Rule Interchange Format Basic Logic Dialect (RIF BLD) standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium is based on F-logic; RIF BLD however does not include non-monotonic reasoning features of F-logic. In contrast to description logic based ontology formalism the semantics of F-logic are normally that of a closed world assumption as opposed to DL's open world assumption. Also, F-logic is generally undecidable, whereas the SHOIN description logic that OWL DL is based on is decidable. However it is possible to represent more expressive statements in F-logic than are possible with description logics. The most comprehensive description of F-logic was published in 1995. The preliminary paper from 1989 won the 1999 Test of Time Award from ACM SIGMOD.