Understanding conceptual graphs

The Erudine Behaviour Engine displays and represents knowledge using conceptual graphs. They show concepts and the relations between these concepts, as in the following example:

In the above example, "Man" and "Dog" are concepts and "has" is the relation between them.

Conceptual graphs can display any type of relations between any number of items. Compared to other methods of knowledge representation, such as XML code and relational databases, conceptual graphs have the following advantages:

• They make it easy to make changes to knowledge.
• They are easy to understand as they are written in everyday words and language.
• They make it easier to digest knowledge because they are graphical representations rather than just words.
• They can display the relationship between any number of items and types of items.
• They scale to almost any size to express almost any type of knowledge.

Colours of shapes within conceptual graphs

The colour of the rectangles and ellipses within conceptual graphs provides more information on the data. The colour of each shape and its borders defines the following properties:

Example of Shape	Colour of Text, Shading and Border	Purpose
	Yellow shading, black border	Input data from the situation.
	Green shading, brown border	Input data that indicates the justification for the conclusion.
	Blue shading, brown border	Output data that defines the conclusion for behaviour.
	Grey shading, black border	Output data from an action plug-in. See Overview of extensions for more details on plug-ins.
	Green border	The currently selected shape.
	Yellow outline	Data that has been found because of a situation search. See Searching for data within a knowledge node for details on searching knowledge models.

Text styles

The type of text styles defines the following properties:

Example of text styles	Text styles	Purpose
	Blue text	Blue text denotes data used to create a cornerstone.
	Literal in brackets	When the literal is in brackets, the justification depends on the concept type. For example, it matters that the entrant has a visa, but we are not interested if the visa is long-stay or not. If the literal is not in brackets, then the justification depends on both the type and literal. For example, it is important that the entrant has a long stay visa.

Platform: all
EBE Version: 2.4
Category: Introduction Guide
Author: Patrick Peisker