Conceptual Structures and Structured Documents

In the first part of this article, we present the benefits of using a structured document editor for storing, editing, and structuring knowledge representations, and show how this can be done for knowledge represented in the Conceptual Graph (CG) formalism. In structured documents, document elements (DEs) are typed and can be organized by structural or hypertext links. They can also be shared (included) by other DEs. The organization of DEs is specified by structure models (Document Type Definitions (DTDs)). A structured document editor displays documents according to their presentation models and lets the users to edit them and to structure them in accordance with their DTDs. We have defined DTDs and presentation models for allowing the storing and display of a CG, a type definition and a hierarchy of types or CGs. Furthermore, we used the functional interface of the structured document editor Thot (previously named Grif) (Quint & Vatton, 1992) so that when a CG, a type definition or a hierarchy is loaded or built in Thot, a similar element is loaded or built in the base of the CG workbench CoGITo (Haemmerle, 1995).