Providing Approximate Answers Using a Knowledge Abstraction Hierarchy

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Cooperative query answering is a research effort to develop a fault-tolerant and intelligent database system using the semantic knowledge base constructed from the underlying database. Such knowledge base has two aspects of usage. One is supporting the cooperative query answering process for providing both an exact answer and neighborhood information relevant to a query. The other is supporting ongoing maintenance of the knowledge base for accommodating the changes in the knowledge content and database usage purpose. Existing studies have mostly focused on the cooperative query answering process but paid little attention to the dynamic knowledge base maintenance. This paper proposes a multi-level knowledge representation framework called Knowledge Abstraction Hierarchy(KAH) that can not only support cooperative query answering but also permit dynamic knowledge maintenance, On the basis of the KAH, a knowledge abstraction database is constructed on the relational data model and accommodates diverse knowledge maintenance needs and flexibly facilitates cooperative query answering. In terms of the knowledge maintenance, database operations are discussed for the cases where either the internal contents for a given KAH change or the structures of the KAH itself change. In terms of cooperative query answering, four types of vague queries are discussed, including approximate selection, approximate join, conceptual selection, and conceptual join. A prototype system has been implemented at KAIST and is being tested with a personnel database system to demonstrate the usefulness and practicality of the knowledge abstraction database in ordinary database application systems.