Combining Terminological and Rule-based Reasoning for Abstraction Processes

Terminological reasoning systems directly support the abstraction mechanisms generalization and classification. But they do not bother about aggregation and have some problems with reasoning demands such as concrete domains, sequences of finite but unbounded size and derived attributes. The paper demonstrates the relevance of these issues in an analysis of a mechanical engineering application and suggests an integration of a forward-chaining rule system with a terminological logic as a solution to these problems. ·Supported by BMFT Research Project ARC-TEC (grant ITW 8902 C4) .