An important structuring mechanism for knowledge bases is building an inheritance hierarchy of classes based on the content of their knowledge objects. This hierarchy facilitates group-related processing tasks such as answering set queries, discriminating between objects, finding similarities among objects, etc. Building this hierarchy is a difficult task for the knowledge engineer. Conceptual clustering may be used to automate or assist the engineer in the creation of such a classification structure. This article introduces a new conceptual clustering method which addresses the problem of clustering large amounts of structured objects. The conditions under which the method is applicable are discussed.
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