  Stable model semantics has become a very popular approach for the management
of negation in logic programming. This approach relies mainly on the closed
world assumption to complete the available knowledge and its formulation has
its basis in the so-called Gelfond-Lifschitz transformation.
  The primary goal of this work is to present an alternative and
epistemic-based characterization of stable model semantics, to the
Gelfond-Lifschitz transformation. In particular, we show that stable model
semantics can be defined entirely as an extension of the Kripke-Kleene
semantics. Indeed, we show that the closed world assumption can be seen as an
additional source of `falsehood' to be added cumulatively to the Kripke-Kleene
semantics. Our approach is purely algebraic and can abstract from the
particular formalism of choice as it is based on monotone operators (under the
knowledge order) over bilattices only.
