Managing complex objects in Peirce

The Peirce project (named after Charles Sanders Peirce) is an international collabora-tive project aiming to construct a freely available conceptual graphs workbench to support research in the conceptual graphs community in areas such as natural language processing, enterprise modelling, program speciication and veriication, management information systems , conceptual information retrieval, medical informatics, and construction of ontologies. Peirce advances the state of the art in conceptual graph implementations and in general complex object classiication. At the core of the Peirce system is an abstract data type for partially ordered sets of objects (poset ADT). The poset ADT is used to organize a conceptual graph database. In this paper we give an overview of the innovative methods for complex object classiication, and illustrate examples using complex object databases with hierarchies of chemical formulas, images and conceptual graph program speciications. We illustrate how conceptual graphs can be used for graphic programming in traditional domains and in organic chemistry and indicate how Peirce's complex object database supports these activities.