Reasoning and Unification over Conceptual Graphs

Reasoning and Unification over Conceptual Graphs is an exploration of automated reasoning and resolution in the expanding field of Conceptual Structures. Designed not only for computing scientists researching Conceptual Graphs, but also for anyone interested in exploring the design of knowledge bases, the book explores what are proving to be the fundamental methods for representing semantic relations in knowledge bases. While it provides the first comprehensive treatment of Conceptual Graph unification and reasoning, the book also addresses fundamental issues of graph matching, automated reasoning, knowledge bases, constraints, ontology and design. With a large number of examples, illustrations, and both formal and informal definitions and discussions, this book is excellent as a tutorial for the reader new to Conceptual Graphs, or as a reference book for a senior researcher in Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Representation or Automated Reasoning.

From the reviews:

"Reasoning and Unification over Conceptual Graphs addresses two main issues: The first one is application of numerical constraints to the values of concepts in a Conceptual Graph, and the second is unification of Conceptual Graphs in general, and constrained ones in particular. If you are a researcher in the Conceptual Graph community this book will be of interest to you. Researchers who are looking into the unification problem in other knowledge representation domains may also benefit from it." (Gilad Mishne, Journal of Logic, Language and Information, Vol. 14, 2005)

Klappentext

STRONGReasoning and Unification over Conceptual Graphs/STRONG is an exploration of automated reasoning and resolution in the expanding field of Conceptual Structures. Designed not only for computing scientists researching Conceptual Graphs, but also for anyone interested in exploring the design of knowledge bases, the book explores what are proving to be the fundamental methods for representing semantic relations in knowledge bases. While it provides the first comprehensive treatment of Conceptual Graph unification and reasoning, the book also addresses fundamental issues of graph matching, automated reasoning, knowledge bases, constraints, ontology and design. With a large number of examples, illustrations, and both formal and informal definitions and discussions, this book is excellent as a tutorial for the reader new to Conceptual Graphs, or as a reference book for a senior researcher in Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Representation or Automated Reasoning.

Inhalt
1 Conceptual Structures.- 1.Introduction.- 2. Overview.- 3. Conceptual Graphs: What They Are and How They Work.- 4. Previous Work in Constraints and Unification over Conceptual Graphs.- 5. Summary.- 2 Unification, Knowledge Structures and Constraints.- 1. Introduction.- 2. Unification.- 3. Feature Structures.- 4. Logic Programming, Constraint Logic Programming, and Constraint Satisfaction Problems.- 5. Unification and Constraints.- 6. Knowledge Structures, Partialness and Unification.- 7. Summary.- 3 An Algorithm for the Unification of Conceptual Graphs with Constraints.- 1. Introduction.- 2. Interval constraints.- 3. Projection and constraints using intervals.- 4. Unification over constraints.- 5. Unification Algorithm.- 6. Summary.- 4 Results, Demonstrations and Comparisons.- 1. Introduction.- 2. Design.- 3. Experiments: Simple Structures.- 4. Experiments: Difficult Structures and Unification Failures.- 5. Comparisons to Other Systems.- 6. Summary.- 5 Placing the Unification Model inContext.- 1. Introduction.- 2. A Framework of Unification Methods.- 3. A Toolbox for Knowledge Conjunction on Conceptual Graphs.- 4. Extending the Model.- 5. Summary.- 6 Conclusions and Future Work.- 1. Conclusions.- 2. Future Directions.- References.