Work on relationships takes place in many communities, including data modeling, knowledge representation, natural language processing, linguistics, and information retrieval. Unfortunately, continued disciplinary splintering and specialization keeps any one person from being familiar with the full expanse of that work. By including contributions from experts (Cruse; Fellbaum; Evens; Green; Guarino and Welty; Hetzler; Hovy; Jouis; Khoo and Myaeng; Khoo, Chan and Niu; McCray and Bodenreider; Pribbenow) in a variety of disciplines and backgrounds, this volume demonstrates both the parallels that inform work on relationships across a number of fields and the singular emphases that have yet to be fully embraced.
The volume is organized into three parts: The first explores types of relationships; the second delves into the role of relationships in knowledge representation and reasoning; the third presents applications that make central use of relationships.