An Inheritance System with Regular Expressions and IS-A Relation

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.

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