07/01/1992 09:00 AM
Computer Science
As large databases of conceptual graphs are developed for complex domains, efficient retrieval techniques must be developed to manage the complexity of graph- matching while maintaining reasonable space requirements. This paper describes a novel method ``the multi-level hierarchical retrieval method\" that exploits redundancy to improve both space and execution time efficiency. The method involves search in multiple partially ordered (by ``more-general-than\") hierarchies such that search in a simpler hierarchy reduces the search time in the hierarchy of next complexity. The specific hierarchies used are: the traditional partial order over conceptual graphs; a partial order over node descriptors; a partial order over ``descriptor units\"; and finally, the simplest partial order is the traditional type hierarchy.
