Relation nets and hypernets

In many respects this report is a companion work of our book "Knowledge representation and relation nets. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, 1999". In some senses it runs parallel to it, while in others it is a sequel to that book. Readers not familiar with the book will find themselves refering back to it several instances to follow some of the subtleties of this work, particularly in the case of concept-relationship knowledge stuctures, abbreviated CRKS in what follows. The main application of CRKS's - namely modelling study material - is not explicitly transscribed to this paper, but that whole notion is abstracted and made independent of any specific teaching/learning metalanguage through the implications of this abstraction. Two key factors emerge from this paper on hypernets. First, unlike the case for CRKS's in which little of the general theory of relation nets applies to CRKS's, the broad theory of hypernets, as far as it is covered in this report, is often applicable to the hypernet equivalent of a CRKS. Second, we will show a link between relation net isomorphism and hypernet isomorphism which makes it considerably easier to deal with CRKS isomorphism and, thus, with structural analogy as used in a modelling based approach to teaching/learning/analogical reasoning. Finally, we must mention that it appears that the domain of potential practical applications of hypernets must inevitably be wider than that for relation nets

Modelling Knowledge Systems using Relation Nets and Hypernets

In the book "Knowledge Representation and Relation Nets" we introduced a structural model called a Relation Net and a special relation net called a Concept Relationship Knowledge Structure (CRKS). In this work we broaden the notion of a relation net to produce a new but associated structural model, a Hypernet. We show that the general theory of hypernets has applications in the acquisition/learning, representation, retrieval, accommodation and assimilation, management and communication/teaching of knowledge, and also in problem representation and solution and in modelling the various modes of reasoning. This report is a revised and extended version of Relation Nets and Hypernets, Technical Report TR-01-020, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science , University of Mannheim, 2001