A RELATIONAL MODEL OF COGNITIVE MAPS

A useful tool for causal reasoning is the language of cognitive maps d eveloped by political scientists to analyse, predict and understand de cisions. Although, this language is based on simple inference rules an d its semantics is ad hoc, it has many attractive aspects and has been found useful in many applications: administrative sciences, game theo ry, information analysis, popular political developments, electrical c ircuits analysis, cooperative man-machines, distributed group-decision support and adaptation and learning, etc. In this paper, we show how cognitive maps can be viewed in the context of relation algebra, and h ow this algebra provides a semantic foundation that helps to develop a computational tool using the language of cognitive maps. (C) 1998 Aca demic Press.