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Abstract : |
Most knowledge representation languages are based on classes and taxonomic relationships between classes. Taxonomic hierarchies without defaults or exceptions are semantically equivalent to a collection of formulas in first or-der predicate calculus. Although designers of knowledge representation lan-guages often express an intuitive feeling that there must be some advantage to representing facts as taxonomic relationships rather than first order for-mulas, there are few,, if any, technical results supporting this intuition. We attempt to remedy this situation by presenting a taxonomic syntax for first order predicate calculus and a series of theorems that support the claim that taxonomic syntax is superior to classical syntax., |
