Semantics of a Graphical Model for Representing Hypotheses and a System Supporting the Management of Hypotheses

Abstract

Constructing hypotheses is a principal work for academic researchers to constitute knowledge. Hypotheses often contain uncertainty, might conflict with each others, and might be revised by discovery of new witnesses. Therefore researchers are heavily loaded with the management of hypotheses. In order to support such activities we propose a graphical model for representing hypotheses, under the recent situation that materials for academic researches are distributed in digital manners, e.g. digital libraries and WWW. We also propose how to construct and manage hypothesis graphs based on our model. It is well-known that graphs are suitable to represent knowledge and many works treating knowledge as graphs have been presented. Previous researches proposed methods how to construct and manage hypotheses automatically, while our present work is aimed at supporting researchers so that they can construct and manage graphs based on semantics with uncertainty. In this paper, we define the syntax and the semantics of hypothesis graphs in our model and present methods to support researchers in the construction and management of hypothesis graphs with a system implemented the methods.