Term Subsumption with Type Constructors

Term Subsumption Languages (TSLs), a generalization of both semantic networks and frames equipped with a model-theoretic semantics, have shown to be of vital practicability for the representation of knowledge. Recently it has been claimed that the modelling power of TSLs could be decisively enhanced by introducing type constructors as they are used in modern typed programming languages. In this paper we do a first step in this direction regarding only those type constructors that are commonly used in semantic data models (SDMs). By exploiting the similarity of abstraction mechanisms in SDMs and TSLs we define the integrated representation model IFO + and demonstrate that the inference mechanisms of both approaches can also be unified. We show in particular that subsumption can be regarded as a stronger version of absolute dominance. keywords: term subsumption language, semantic data modelling, subsumption, type constructor, restructuring 1 Introduction The notion of term subsumpt..