Description Logic and Faceted Knowledge Representation

The term ”facet” was introduced into the field of library classification systems by Ranganathan in the 1930’s [Ranganathan, 1962]. A facet is a viewpoint or aspect. In contrast to traditional classification systems, faceted systems are modular in that a domain is analyzed in terms of baseline facets which are then synthesized. In this paper, the term ”facet” is used in a broader meaning. Facets can describe different aspects on the same level of abstraction or the same aspect on different levels of abstraction. The notion of facets is related to database views, multicontexts and conceptual scaling in formal concept analysis [Ganter and Wille, 1999], polymorphism in object-oriented design, aspect-oriented programming, views and contexts in description logic and semantic networks. This paper presents a definition of facets in terms of faceted knowledge representation that incorporates the traditional narrower notion of facets and potentially facilitates translation between different knowledge representation formalisms. A goal of this approach is a modular, machine-aided knowledge base design mechanism. A possible application is faceted thesaurus construction for information retrieval and data mining. Reasoning complexity depends on the size of the modules (facets). A more general analysis of complexity will be left for future research.