Demokratin ifrågasätts i dagens värld genom att auktoritära och fundamentalistiska ideologier av flera slag förs fram som alternativ. De tillämpas i praktiken i ett flertal länder, men de sprids också genom aktiv propaganda. Den här boken utgår från föreställningen att detta utgör en utmaning även för vårt land, och den föreslår framförallt två åtgärder för att möta den utmaningen.

Ett förslag är att precisera samhällets demokratiska grundsatser och att komplettera dem med några ytterligare punkter, såsom följande. En princip om assimilationsfrihet formuleras, alltså en rättighet att byta etnisk, religiös eller politisk tillhörighet om man vill, och samtidigt förstås en rättighet att bevara den man har. I boken föreslås utvidgat skydd för dessa rättigheter. Likaså införs begreppet religionism, alltså hävdandet att en viss religion är överlägsen andra och är förutbestämd att ta över, och det föreslås att religionism ska likställas med rasism.

Det andra huvudförslaget är att betrakta nationen som bäraren av detta utvidgade demokratibegrepp, men då handlar det om nationen i en annan bemärkelse än vad dagens `nationalister' föreställer sig. Boken anknyter till skillnaden mellan etnisk och samhällelig nationalism (`civic nationalism' på engelska). I den förra sökerman göra en etnisk grupp till en nation, i den senare ses nationen som fundamentet för staten och samhället, och som den samlande faktorn för alla medborgare som ansluter sig till det demokratiska samhällets principer.

Boken hävdar också att en kunskap om Sveriges historia ur politisk och religiös synpunkt är viktig för att kunna relatera till de främmande ideologierna och för attförstå hur vår samhällsmodell förhåller sig till deras.

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Open peer review has been proposed for a number of reasons, in particular, for increasing the transparency of the article selection process for a journal, and for obtaining a broader basis for feedback to the authors and for the acceptance decision. The review discussion may also in itself have a value for the research community. These goals rely on the existence of a lively review discussion, but several experiments with open-process peer review in recent years have encountered the problem of faltering review discussions. The present article addresses the question of how lively review discussion may be fostered by relating the experience of the journal Electronic Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (ETAI) which was an early experiment with open peer review. Factors influencing the discussion activity are identified. It is observed that it is more difficult to obtain lively discussion when the number of contributed articles increases, which implies difficulties for scaling up the open peer review model. Suggestions are made for how this difficulty may be overcome.

This note describes how the notion of nonmonotonic reasoning emerged in Artificial Intelligence from the mid-1960s to 1980. It gives particular attention to the interplay between three kinds of activities: design of high-level programming systems for AI, design of truth-maintenance systems, and the development of nonmonotonic logics. This was not merely a development from logic to implementation: in several cases there was a development from a system design to a corresponding logic. The article concludes with some reflections on the roles and relationships between logicist theory and system design in AI, and in particular in Knowledge Representation.

This article introduces and uses a representation of defeasible inheritance networks where links in the network are viewed as propositions, and where defeasible links are tagged with a quantitative indication of the proportion of exceptions, called the doubt index. This doubt index is used for restricting the length of the chains of inference. The representation also introduces the use of defeater literals that disable the chaining of subsumption links. The use of defeater literals replaces the use of negative defeasible inheritance links, expressing "most A are not B". The new representation improves the expressivity significantly. Inference in inheritance networks is defined by a combination of axioms that constrain the contents of network extensions, a heuristic restriction that also has that effect, and a nonmonotonic operation of minimizing the set of defeater literals while retaining consistency. We introduce an underlying semantics that defines the meaning of literals in a network, and prove that the axioms are sound with respect to this semantics. We also discuss the conditions for obtaining completeness. Traditional concepts, assumptions and issues in research on nonmonotonic or defeasible inheritance are reviewed in the perspective of this approach.

The newly appeared Handbook of Knowledge Representation is an impressive piece of work. Its three editors and its forty-five contributors have produced twenty-five concise, textbook-style chapters that introduce most of the major aspects of the science of knowledge representation. Reading this book is a very positive experience: it demonstrates the breadth, the depth and the coherence that our field has achieved by now.

A substantial knowledgebase is an important part of many A.I. applications as well as (arguably) in any system that is claimed to implement broad-range intelligence. Although this has been an accepted view in our field since very long, little progress has been made towards the establishment of large and sharable knowledgebases. Both basic research projects and applications projects have found it necessary to construct special-purpose knowledgebases for their respective needs. This is obviously a problem: it would save work and speed up progress if the construction of a broadly sharable and broadly useful knowledgebase could be a joint undertaking for the field. In this article I wish to discuss the possibilities and the obstacles in this respect. I shall argue that the field of Knowledge Representation needs to adopt a new and very different paradigm in order for progress to be made, so that besides working as usual on logical foundations and on algorithms, we should also devote substantial efforts to the systematic preparation of knowledgebase contents.

The concept of a 'publication' no longer applies only to printed works, information technology has extended its application to several other types of works. This article describes a facility called the Common Knowledge Library that publishes modules of formally structured information representing facts and knowledge of various kinds. Publications of this new type have some characteristics in common with databases, and others in common with software modules, however, they also share some important characteristics with traditional publications. A framework for citation of previous work is important in order to provide an incentive for contributors of such modules. Peer review - the traditional method of quality assurance for scientific articles - must also be applied, although in a modified form, for fact and knowledge modules. The construction of the Common Knowledge Library is a cumulative process, new contributions are obtained by interpreting the contents of existing knowledge sources on the Internet, and the existing contents of the Library are an important resource for that interpretation process.

Gilles Kahn was one of the most influential figures in the development of computer science and information technology, not only in Europe but throughout the world. This volume of articles by several leading computer scientists serves as a fitting memorial to Kahn's achievements and reflects the broad range of subjects to which he contributed through his scientific research and his work at INRIA, the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control. The editors also reflect upon the future of computing: how it will develop as a subject in itself and how it will affect other disciplines, from biology and medical informatics, to web and networks in general. Its breadth of coverage, topicality, originality and depth of contribution, make this book a stimulating read for all those interested in the future development of information technology.