Factorization of an inheritance knowledge base (II)

Abstract

In [6] we start to develop the decomposition of inheritance knowledge bases ([5]) into disjoint components such that the answer mapping can be locally computed in some component( factorization problem). This paper includes several further results concerning these structures. The main results presented in this paper are the following: we demonstrate that every component is itself an inheritance knowledge base and we prove that an interrogation for the object x in Obj(K) can be equivalently accomplished in the component which contains the object x. The factorization of a knowledge base is a useful operation in the vision of an implementation on several work stations in a network architecture. Several open problems are discussed in the last section.