Similarity Measures for Object-Oriented Case Representations

Object-oriented case representations require approaches for similarity assessment that allow to compare two differently structured objects, in particular, objects belonging to different object classes. Currently, such similarity measures are developed more or less in an ad-hoc fashion. It is mostly unclear, how the structure of an object-oriented case model, e.g., the class hierarchy, influences similarity assessment. Intuitively, it is obvious that the class hierarchy contains knowledge about the similarity of the objects. However, how this knowledge relates to the knowledge that could be represented in similarity measures is not obvious at all. This paper analyzes several situations in which class hierarchies are used in different ways for case modeling and proposes a systematic way of specifying similarity measures for comparing arbitrary objects from the hierarchy. The proposed similarity measures have a clear semantics and are computationally inexpensive to compute at run-time.