Eklund, P. (1990). Negotiating Conceptual Structures: Inheritance Hierarchies. Technical Report LiTH-IDA-R-90-21, Department of Computer and Information Science, Linköping University, Sweden. Also in Proc. of 5th Annual Workshop on Conceptual Structures, Boston and Stockholm, August 1990. (bibtex),
Abstract: Inheritance networks represent an important class of knowledge representation devices belonging to conceptual structures. Their primary purpose is to describe generalization/specialization relationships between classes and instances of concepts in the form of taxonomies. To make proper use of inheritance hierarchies in knowledge engineering logically consistency is required. Network representations need to be free of inconsistent interpretations. This work provides a formal dialogue framework for inheritance hierarchy construction which ensures that the network described to a system reflects the intentions of the operator. In situations where the dialogue leads to a network which contains mutually exclusive logical states we apply a nonmonotonic logic (NML) to explain inconsistency.
CS Dept TR Overview