Management of knowledge abstraction hierarchy

Cooperative query answering is a research effort to develop a fault-tolerant and intelligent database system using the semantic knowledge base constructed from the underlying database. Such knowledge base has two aspects of usage. One is supporting the cooperative query answering process for providing both an exact answer and neighborhood information relevant to a query. The other is supporting ongoing maintenance of the knowledge base for accommodating the changes in the knowledge content and database usage purpose. Existing studies have mostly focused on the cooperative query answering process but paid little attention to the dynamic knowledge base maintenance. This paper proposes a multi-level knowledge representation framework called Knowledge Abstraction Hierarchy (KAH) that can not only support cooperative query answering but also permit dynamic knowledge maintenance. The KAH consists of two types of knowledge abstraction hierarchies. The value abstraction hierarchy is constructed by abstract values that are hierarchically derived from specific data values in the underlying database on the basis of generalization and specialization relationships. The domain abstraction hierarchy is built on the various domains of the data values and incorporates the classification relationship between super-domains and sub-domains. On the basis of the KAH, a knowledge abstraction database is constructed on the relational data model and accommodates diverse knowledge maintenance needs and flexibly facilitates cooperative query answering. In terms of the knowledge maintenance, database operations are discussed for the cases where either the internal contents for a given KAH change or the structures of the KAH itself change. In terms of cooperative query answering, database operations are discussed for both the generalization and specialization processes, and the conceptual query handling. A prototype system has been implemented at KAIST that demonstrates the usefulness of KAH in ordinary database application systems.