Ontological Aspects of Computing Analogies

In AI, there is an increasing interest in examining ontologies for a variety of applications. Classical ontologies can have different forms ranging from lattice-like structures (Ganter & Wille, 1996) to less restricted semantic networks (Peters & Shrobe, 2003). Analogical reasoning has a long tradition in cognitive science and AI. The monograph Gentner, Holyoak & Kokinov (2001) is a good summary of recent theories for analogies. An important tool for modeling analogies is anti-unification (AU), introduced in Plotkin (1970). AU is a framework to compute generalizations of source and target which in turn can be used to establish an analogical relation (Schmid, Gust, Kühnberger & Burghardt, 2003). We will extend AU to so-called heuristic-driven theory projection (HDTP) to model analogical reasoning processes.