Prime Normal Forms in Belief Merging

The aim of Belief Merging is to aggregate possibly conflicting pieces of information issued from different sources. The quality of the resulting set is usually considered in terms of a closeness criterion between the resulting belief set and the initial belief sets. The notion of distance between belief sets is thus a crucial issue when we face the merging problem. The aim of this paper is twofold: introducing a syntactical way to calculate distances and proposing the use of a distance based on prime implicants and prime implicates that considers the importance of each propositional symbol in the belief set.