STRUCTURED OBJECT REPRESENTATIONS

The representations aggregates several related predicate calculus expressions into larger structures (sometimes called units) that are identified with important objects in the subject domain of the system. When information about one of these objects is needed by the system, the appropriate unit is accessed and all of the relevant facts about the object are retrieved at once. It uses the phrase structured objects to describe these representational schemes because of the heavy emphasis on the structure of the representation. Indeed the structure carries some of the representational and computational burden. Certain operations that might otherwise have been performed by explicit rule applications can be performed in a more automatic way by mechanisms that depend on the structure of the representation.