Relations, structures et objets : quelques variations

The purpose of this paper is to sketch a survey on how relations and structures are taken into account in various knowledge representation formalisms and tools: description logics, object-based knowledge representation systems, conceptual graphs, semantic web languages. We focus on the representation of relation properties, on the representation of relation-based inference rules, on the representation and classification of structures and composite objects. The paper ends with a discussion on the advantages of the various systems and a proposition of research issues and possible solutions.