Symmetry and the Computation of Conceptual Structures

The discovery and exploitation of symmetry plays a major role in sciences such as crystallography, quantum theory, condensed-matter physics, thermodynamics, chemistry, biology and others. It then should not be surprising then, since Conceptual Structures are proposed as a universal knowledge representation scheme, that symmetry should play a role in their interpretation and their application. In this tutorial style paper, we illustrate the role of symmetry in Conceptual Structures and how algorithms may be constructed that exploit this symmetry in order to achieve computational efficiency.