Exploring fundamental research questions, Conceptual Structures in Practice takes you through the basic yet nontrivial task of establishing conceptual relations as the foundation for research in knowledge representation and knowledge mining. It includes contributions from leading researchers in both the conceptual graph and formal concept analysis

This book is the proceedings of the Second International Conference on Conceptual Structures, ICCS '94, held at College Park, Maryland, USA in August 1994. This proceedings presents, on an international scale, up-to- the-minute research results on theoretical and applicational aspects of conceptual graphs, particularly on the use of contexts in knowledge representation. The concept of contexts is highly important for all kinds of knowledge-intensive systems. The book is organized into sections on natural language understanding, rational problem solving, conceptual graph theory, contexts and canons, and data modeling.

With all of the news about the Internet and the Y2K problem, it is easy to forget that other areas of computer science still exist. Reading the newspaper or watching the television conveys a very warped view of what is happening in computer science. This conference illustrates how a maturing subdiscipline of computer science can continue to grow and integrate within it both old and new approaches despite (or perhaps due to) a lack of public awareness. The conceptual graph community has basically existed since the 1984 publication of John Sowa's book, "Conceptual Structures: Information Processing In Mind and Machine." In this book, John Sowa laid the foundations for a knowledge representation model called conceptual graphs based on semantic networks and the existential graphs of C.S. Peirce. Conceptual graphs constitutes a very powerful and expressive knowledge representation scheme, inheriting the benefits of logic and the mathematics of graphs. The expressiveness and formal underpinnings of conceptual graph theory have attracted a large international community of researchers and scholars. The International Conferences on Conceptual Structures, and this is the seventh in the series, is the primary forum for these researchers to report their progress and activities. As in the past, the doors were open to admit alternate representation models and approaches.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Conceptual Structures, ICCS 2008, held in Toulouse, France, in July 2008. The 19 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from over 70 submissions. The scope of the contributions ranges from theoretical and methodological topics to implementation issues and applications. The papers present a family of Conceptual Structure approaches that build on techniques derived from artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, applied mathematics and lattice theory, computational linguistics, conceptual modeling, intelligent systems and knowledge management.

Computerscientistscreatemodelsofaperceivedreality.ThroughAItechniques, these models aim at providing the basic support for emulating cognitive - havior such as reasoning and learning, which is one of the main goals of the AI research e?ort. Such computer models are formed through the interaction of various acquisition and inference mechanisms: perception, concept learning, conceptual clustering, hypothesis testing, probabilistic inference, etc., and are represented using di?erent paradigms tightly linked to the processes that use them. Among these paradigms let us cite: biological models (neural nets, genetic programming), logic-based models (?rst-order logic, modal logic, rule-based s- tems), virtual reality models (object systems, agent systems), probabilistic m- els(Bayesiannets,fuzzylogic),linguisticmodels(conceptualdependencygraphs, language-based representations), etc. OneofthestrengthsoftheConceptualGraph(CG)theoryisitsversatilityin terms of the representation paradigms under which it falls. It can be viewed and therefore used, under di?erent representation paradigms, which makes it a p- ular choice for a wealth of applications. Its full coupling with di?erent cognitive processes lead to the opening of the ?eld toward related research communities such as the Description Logic, Formal Concept Analysis, and Computational Linguistic communities. We now see more and more research results from one community enrich the other, laying the foundations of common philosophical grounds from which a successful synergy can emerge.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the Third International Conference on Conceptual Structures, ICCS '95, held in Santa Cruz, California in August 1995. Conceptual structures are a modern treatment of Peirce's existential graphs, a graphic notation for classical logic with higher order extensions. Besides three invited papers, there are included 21 revised full papers selected from 58 submission. The volume reflects the state-of-the-art in this research area of growing interest. The papers are organized in sections on natural language, applications, programming in conceptual graphs, machine learning and knowledge acquisition, hardware and implementation, graph operations, and ontologies and theory.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Conceptual Structures, ICCS 2006, held in Aalborg, Denmark in July 2006. The volume presents 24 revised full papers, together with 6 invited papers. The papers address topics such as conceptual structures; their interplay with language, semantics and pragmatics; formal methods for concept analysis and contextual logic, modeling, representation, and visualization of concepts; conceptual knowledge acquisition and more.

This volume contains selected papers presented at the 12th International C- ference on Conceptual Structures, ICCS 2004, held in Huntsville Alabama, July 19–23, 2004. The main theme of the conference, “Conceptual Structures at Work”, was chosen to express our intention of applying conceptual structures for hum- centered practical purposes. That invites us to develop not only clear conceptual theories,butalsomethodstosupporthumansintheapplicationofthesetheories in their societies. Some promising steps in this direction are being taken, but the gap between the researchers working on a highly sophisticated level on one side and the practitioners in many ?elds of applications on the other side is usually di?culttobridge.Someofushaveexperiencesinsuchpracticalcooperation,but we need more members of our community to be engaged in “real life problems”. We all know that solutions of complex problems in practice require not only a well-developed formal theory, but also an understanding of the whole context of the given problems. To support our understanding we need general philo- phical methods as well as formal theories for the representation of fundamental structures in practice. We believe that our community has powerful tools and methodsforsuccessfulapplicationsinpractice,butthatwemustdevelopaforum to present our results to a broader audience. First we must understand the s- ni?cant developments in our own group, which has activities in many directions of research.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Conceptual Structures, ICCS 2001, held in Stanford, CA, USA in July/August 2001. The 26 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the proceedings. The book offers topical sections on language and knowledge structures, logical and mathematical foundations of conceptual structures, conceptual structures for data and knowledge bases, conceptual structures and meta-data, and algorithms and systems.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Conceptual Structures, ICCS 2013, held in Mumbai, India, in January 2013. The 22 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 43 submissions for inclusion in the book. The volume also contains 3 invited talks. ICCS focuses on the useful representation and analysis of conceptual knowledge with research and business applications. It advances the theory and practice in connecting the user's conceptual approach to problem solving with the formal structures that computer applications need to bring their productivity to bear. Conceptual structures (CS) represent a family of approaches that builds on the successes of artificial intelligence, business intelligence, computational linguistics, conceptual modeling, information and Web technologies, user modeling, and knowledge management.