Organization of knowledge using order factors

Abstract

A central mechanism for the storage and retrieval of conceptual structures is the generalization hierarchy. Improvements on search in the hierarchy have been made by analyzing the order structure. We continue this by factorising the order structure into scales. We show how a membership operation can be improved by scaling of knowledge. The membership problem is a special case of the insertion problem for creating hierarchies. We give a O(k. logk n) membership algorithm for a class of orders known as term products that can be generated from existing term encoding methods.