A purely taxonomic and descriptive meaning for classes

Jérôme Euzenat (1)

1 SHERPA - Object Knowledge Bases

Three different aspects of classes in object-based systems arestudied: the distinction between classes and instances, the separation of ontological from taxonomic function of classes and their descriptive or definitional meaning. The advantages of using a descriptive and taxonomic meaning for classes are advocated. One of the important reasons for separating ontology from taxonomy is the multiplicity of taxonomies over a same set of objects and the independence of objects from these taxonomies. These distinctions ground the semantics of the object-based representation system TROPES. The specialisation relation in TROPES is examined under this light and the classification mechanism is interpreted under the descriptive setting. It is shown that the use of a descriptive semantics of classes can support a semantics for the classification mechanism. In fact, there is no intrinsic superiority of definition over description: the precision of the former is balanced by the generality of the later.

Mots clés: Specialisation; Classification; Categorisation; Instantiation; Descriptive classes; Definitional classes

Domaines: Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]; Logique en informatique [cs.LO]

Jérôme Euzenat. A purely taxonomic and descriptive meaning for classes. IJCAI workshop on object-based representation systems, Aug 1993, Chambéry, France. pp.81-92. ⟨hal-01401187⟩