A note on the representation and the manipulation of structures
Résumé
In this position paper for the Dl'98 workshop, we present a discussion on the notion of structure and on the related reasoning problems. Structures are widely used in artificial intelligence to represent real-world concepts, especially in design, configuration and classification problems. A structure is a composite object --composite objects and structures are strongly related-- which has a number of parts that are interconnected and that can be composite objects themselves (structure = collection of parts + configuration information).