jjohhn has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I want to build a toy "theorem prover" piece of software. I have some familiarity with a large commercial product of this sort, written in Java, and used for terminology construction. A terminology is set of "concepts" that relate to each other either through "Is_a" relationships ("a red_dictionary is_a book") or through attribute relationships ("a red_dictionary has_color red")

The software detects equivalence ("red car has_brand chevy" <==>"car has_color red, has_brand chevy") The notation for this usually uses logic symbols, but I don't want to clutter this post right now.

The software does something else too (calculates subsumed children), but understanding how to do just the first piece would satisfy me for now.

The terminology would require a few disjoint hierarchies; one for the relationship types (is_a, has_color, has_brand), one for the objects (vehicle perhaps), and one or for the values of the attributes (red, blue, chevy, ford) The attributes in this example would be in two hierarchies: Colors and Brands.

My big questiojn is how do I make a data structure to do this? I am nearly sure it si not done though tradition OO clases, as I don't think that could scale to the level of the commercial product (hundreds of thousands of concepts, over a million relationships talking into a big oracle database.

I just can't get my mind around the first steps of how to model this on a tiny scale in perl. I'd like to output to a set of tables because I am most familiar with that; the commercial product outputs XML that is then converted to tables though.

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Re: toy subsumption classifier
by eoin (Monk) on Mar 11, 2003 at 23:34 UTC
    I'm not too sure that this'll work. With this mod you assert rules and facts and Then you search your universe of truths in a top down or bottom-up manner, depending on what you want to do with the results, but.....
    This might work:

    AI::Proplog

    if you search in cpan and read the docs. I'm sure that it will help.

    Maybe. ;)


    All the Best, Eoin...

    If everything seems to be going well, you obviously don't know what the hell is going on.
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      This looks pretty right on; of course there would be a module that relates to my question. I should have looked there first. Thank you!
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Re: toy subsumption classifier
by demerphq (Chancellor) on Mar 11, 2003 at 22:54 UTC

    Sounds like RDF to me. Not that I know anything about it, but it was a colleagues pet subject for a couple of weeks and from what I recall it was quite like this. (I admit that I didnt pay a lot of attention ;-)

    The best I can do for you is point out this node to him and hopefully he has something constructive to say. Im pretty sure he was messing with it via perl so probably there is something useful there.


    ---
    demerphq


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