An Inheritance System with Regular Expressions and IS-A Relation

Author: Tsukamoto M.   Nishio S.  

Publisher: Springer Publishing Company

ISSN: 0925-4676

Source: Journal of Systems Integration, Vol.7, Iss.3-4, 1997-09, pp. : 349-379

Disclaimer: Any content in publications that violate the sovereignty, the constitution or regulations of the PRC is not accepted or approved by CNPIEC.

Previous Menu Next

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an inheritance system for knowledge-bases in which IS-A relation and IS-NOT-A relation are specified on the domain extended by dot notation `.'. Due to the simplicity of the framework, we can obtain several computational advantages including the following: (1) IS-A relation and IS-NOT-A relation are determined in polynomial time. (2) Satisfiability of a given knowledge-base is also determined in polynomial time. (3) Set-at-a-time queries are completely answered by regular expressions. (4) Regular expressions are also used for specifications of knowledge-bases. Consequently, we can achieve advanced reasoning by the computational operations on regular sets using union, intersection, and difference. Furthermore, the obtained results can be incrementally reused to specify new knowledge-bases. Several applications of the proposed inheritance reasoning mechanism in advanced computer systems are also demonstrated.