1994 年 9 巻 3 号 p. 447-455
The concept of inheritance is one of the most important notions in knowledge representation paradigm and the object-oriented programming/databases. However, we have several issues of computation for handling the inheritance mechanism which include the infiniteness property of the domain as well as the procedure of computation. To overcome this deficiency, we propose a framework for knowledge representation called DOT, which employs the regular expression for representing IS-A relations defined on the domain extended by dot notations. In this DOT, introducing a transformation between two equivalent knowledge representations, the possibly infinite set of all answers to a query can be finitely specified using regular expressions. In such a manner, the problem of infiniteness is easily and directly handled under the framework of DOT, and this DOT is closed in the class of regular sets regarding the computation of inference based on its inheritance mechanism.
