Extraction of common properties of objects for creation of a logic ontology

Abstract

The paper describes an approach to the formation of ontology based on descriptions of objects in terms of the predicate calculus language. With this approach, an object is represented as a set of its elements, on which a set of predicates is defined that defines the properties of these elements and the relationship between them. A description of an object is a conjunction of literals that are true on elements of an object. In the present work, ontology is understood as an oriented graph with descriptions of subsets as nodes and such that the elements of a set at the end of an oriented edge have the properties of the elements of the set at the beginning of this edge. Three settings of an ontology construction problem are considered: 1) all predicates are binary and subsets of the original set of objects are given; 2) all predicates are binary and it is required to find subsets of the original set; 3) among the predicates there are many-valued ones and subsets of the original set of objects are given. The main tool for construction such a description is to extract an elementary conjunction of literals of predicate formulas that is isomorphic to subformulas of some formulas. The definition of an isomorphism of elementary conjunctions of atomic predicate formulas is given. The method of ontology construction is formulated. An illustrative example is provided.