An empirical analysis of terminological representation systems

Abstract

The family of terminological representation systems has its roots in the representation system KL-ONE. Since the development of this system more than a dozen similar representation systems have been developed by various research groups. These systems vary along a number of dimensions.In this paper, we present the results of an empirical analysis of six such systems. Surprisingly, the systems turned out to be quite diverse leading to problems when transporting knowledge bases from one system to another. Additionally, the runtime performance between different systems and knowledge bases varied more than we expected. Finally, our empirical runtime performance results give an idea of what runtime performance to expect from such representation systems. These findings complement previously reported analytical results about the computational complexity of reasoning in such systems.