AN EMPIRICAL-ANALYSIS OF TERMINOLOGICAL REPRESENTATION SYSTEMS

The family of terminological representation systems has its roots in t he representation system KL-ONE. Since the development of KL-ONE more than a dozen similar representation systems have been developed by var ious 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 divers e, leading to problems when transporting knowledge bases from one syst em to another. Additionally, the runtime performance of different syst ems and knowledge bases varied more than we expected. Finally, our emp irical runtime performance results give an idea of what runtime perfor mance to expect from such representation systems. These findings compl ement previously reported analytical results about the computational c omplexity of reasoning in such systems.