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Relation nets and hypernets

Abstract

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

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