Automatic Structuring of Knowledge Bases by Conceptual Clustering

3 An important structuring mechanism for knowledge bases is building an inheritance hierarchy of classes based on the content of their knowledge objects. This hierarchy facilitates group-related processing tasks such as answering set queries, discriminating between objects, finding similarities among objects, etc. Building this hierarchy is a difficult task for the knowledge engineer. Conceptual clustering may be used to automate or assist the engineer in the creation of such a classification structure. This article introduces a new conceptual clustering method which addresses the problem of clustering large amounts of structured objects. The conditions under which the method is applicable are discussed. indexed terms: conceptual clustering, data structures, knowledge bases, knowledge indexing, machine learning 1. Introduction A classification structure is a set of hierarchically related classes, where hierarchically higher classes subsume their lower counter-parts. It can be viewe..