ABSTRACT
The ERA ERA (Epistemological Reasoning Architecture) is an automated reasoning system able to represent and handle uncertainty. It provides a good example to illustrate the model of distributed computation suitable for the WWW. The core of ERA is a Belief Maintenance Systems (BMS) based on probabilistic logic, and therefore called Logic-based BMS (LBMS) (Ramoni and Riva, 1993). A BMS is a Truth Maintenance System (TMS) able to use probabilistic rather than Boolean truth-values. A TMS is an independent reasoning module, which incrementally maintains the beliefs for a general problem solving system, and enables it to reason with temporary assumptions on the basis of incomplete information. Its use endows the problem solver with the ability of assuming and retracting beliefs, detecting contradictions, and identifying the assumptions responsible for its conclusions.
