Publikation
Well-formed Default Unification in Multiple Inheritance Hierarchies
Christian Husodo Schulz
Mastersthesis, DFKI, 2007.
Zusammenfassung
One practical approach to using ontologies for knowledge representation and reasoning
is the approximation through typed feature structures. The non-deterministic multiple
inheritance hierarchies used for ontologies can be mapped immediately to typed feature
structures. An important inference operation is default unification which computes the
maximally compatible combination of new information (cover ) and old information (background).
It is fundamental to ensure that such an operation does not limit the design
of the ontology. In this work we provide an extension to default unification. Firstly
the operation produces feasible results in multiple inheritance hierarchies that are nondeterministic.
Secondly the specification of the algorithm guarantees that well-formedness
is not violated.