Conditionals are omnipresent, in everyday life as well as in scientific environments; they represent generic knowledge acquired inductively or learned from books. They tie a flexible and highly interrelated network of connections along which reasoning is possible and which can be applied to different situations. Therefore, conditionals are important, but also quite problematic objects in knowledge representation.
This book presents a new approach to conditionals which captures their dynamic, non-proportional nature particularly well by considering conditionals as agents shifting possible...

Conditionals are fascinating and versatile objects of knowledge representation. On the one hand, they may express rules in a very general sense, representing, for example, plausible relationships, physical laws, and social norms. On the other hand, as default rules or general implications, they constitute a basic tool for reasoning, even in the presence of uncertainty. In this sense, conditionals are intimately connected both to information and inference. Due to their non-Boolean nature, however, conditionals are not easily dealt with. They are not simply true or false -- rather, a...

An ideal text for researchers and professionals alike, this book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Foundations of Information and Knowledge Systems, FoIKS 2008 held in Pisa, Italy, in February 2008. The 13 revised full papers are presented together with nine revised short papers and three invited lectures. All of these were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from a total of 79 submissions.