The Foundations of Conceptual Programming

Conceptual Programming is a term meant to convey a similar idea to that of Logic Programming, but at a higher level of representation. Programming with concepts, as presented here, has all the advantages that many knowledge representation schemes have in dealing with declarative knowledge i.e. explicitness, naturalness, expressibility, and transparency. It also gives procedural knowledge these same features, using the same representational technology, thus providing uniformity of expression for both forms of knowledge. This paper presents an overview of an augmented version of John Sowa's conceptual graph theory; a recipe of necessary items for building a conceptual programming system; and an outline of technical difficulties in building the interpreter for the system. Conceptual programming is intended for work in knowledge engineering. A case is made, however, for its inclusion in the repertoire of general-purpose computing language systems.