Representing Conceptual Graphs in Algernon: Working Note 9

“Conceptual Graphs” have become a popular representational formalism in AI research. They were introduced by Sowa in his 1984 book “Conceptual Structures” [Sowa, 1984], as a modern treatment of ideas from the 19th century philosopher Peirce. Conceptual graphs are also the fundamental representational unit in KM/KQL [Clark, 1996], the language of the Botany KB project. In KM, these units are referred to as ‘frames’; Each frame encodes a CG along with addition information, in the form of access paths, about how to infer values of particular nodes (see Section 3.2). This working note describes now conceptual graphs can be mapped onto the representation language Algernon [Crawford and Kuipers, 1991, Crawford, 1990]. Section 3 describes one way in which CGs can be encoded in Algernon, where a set of rules encodes the various implications which a CG contains. Section 4 discusses this and alternative ways that CGs could be encoded with Algernon, and their relative merits and weaknesses.