Section: Software

Keywords : knowledge representation.

AROM

Participants : Philippe Genoud, Danielle Ziébelin [ Correspondent ] .

AROM ( "Associate Relationships and Objets for Modeling") is both a knowledge representation formalism and a knowledge base management system that implements this formalism. AROM belongs to the family of Object Oriented Knowledge Representation Systems. The originality of AROM is to explicitly represent relationships between instances of classes by a specific modeling entity called Association. An association can link several (i.e more than two) classes; it is defined by the roles these classes play in the associations and by cardinality constraints. As for Classes, Associations may have attributes and can be organized in specialization hierarchies. AROM is implemented in Java. Its fully documented API makes it easy to integrate in a larger system. The explicit description of associations allows to design easy to read knowledge bases and appears to be particularly adapted for representing biological knowledge. AROM is the very substrate of the GenoStar/Iogma platform. For more information, see: http://www-helix.inrialpes.fr/article221.html