Meaning and links: a semantic odyssey
William A. Woods · 2004
I have been asked about the paper What's in a Link: how it came to be, what was happening in the field at the time, and how the ideas have evolved since then. This talk will describe my perspective on some of the things that I saw happening around me that led me to write the paper, some of the background thoughts that led to the ideas presented there, and how some of those ideas have evolved since then. In this abstract, I will list some of the threads that I will discuss and provide some of the relevant references. What's in a Link (Woods, 1975), advocated a standard of rigor for the representational conventions used in semantic networks and pointed out some of the different things that a link can be used for and some of the confusions that were present in many informal notions of network representation. The message of that paper has been well received, and my goals of stimulating more attention to the semantics of representational devices has been gratifyingly realized. Since then, many semantic network systems have made an effort to make clear distinctions about such issues as structural versus assertional devices and the distinctions between kinds and instances. Moreover, a substantial body of work in terminological subsumption and related issues has focused on the expressive power of representational primitives and the computational consequences of various representational mechanisms, including a substantial body of work stimulated by the KL-ONE knowledge