A Structural Paradigm for Representing Knowledge.

Abstract : This report presents on associative network formalism for representing conceptual knowledge. While many similar formalisms have been developed since the introduction of the semantic network in 1966, they have often suffered from inconsistent interpretation of their links, lack of appropriate structure in their nodes, and general expressive inadequacy. In this paper, we take a detailed look at the history of these semantic nets and begin to understand their inadequacies by examining closely what their representational pieces have been intended to model. Based on this analysis, a new type of network is presented - the Structured Inheritance Network (SI-NET) - designed to circumvent common expressive shortcomings.