CATEGORIES AND OBJECTS:

 The organization of objects into categories is a vital part of

knowledge representation.
 Although interaction with the world takes place at the level of
individual objects, much reasoning takes place at the level of
categories. For example, a shopper might have the goal of buying
a basketball, rather than a particular basketball such as BB9.
 There are two choices for representing categories in first-order
logic: predicates and objects.
 That is, we can use the predicate Basketbal∈ (b), or we can reify
the category as an object, Basketballs. We could then say
Member(b, Basketballs) (which we will abbreviate as b ∈
Basketballs) to say that b is a member of the category of
basketballs. We say Subset(Basketballs, Balls) (abbreviated as
Basketballs ⊂ Balls) to say that Basketballs is a subcategory, or
subset, of Balls.
 So you can think of a category as being the set of its members, or you can
think of it as a more complex object that just happens to have the Member
and Subset relations defined for it.
 First-order logic makes it easy to state facts about categories, either by
relating objects to categories or by quantifying over their members:

 Notice that because Dogs is a category and is a member of

DomesticatedSpecies, the latter it must be a category of categories.
 One can even have categories of categories of categories, but they
are not much use.
DISJOINT:
 We say that two or more categories are disjoint if they have no
members in common.
 Males and females are disjoint
Exhaustive decomposition:
Definition:
A decomposition of a class into categories is called exhaustive if
each object of the class must belong to at least one category.
living = {animal, vegetable, fungi, bacteria}

 We will not know that an animal that is not a male must be a

female, unless we say that males and females constitute an
exhaustive decomposition of the animals.
PARTITION:
Definition:
A partition is an exhaustive decomposition of a class into disjoint
subsets.
student = {undergraduate, graduate}
The following examples illustrate these three concepts:

Related problem: clustering. Given a set of objects, find an

appropriate category for each of them. The categories may not
be predefined.
Categories can also be defined by providing necessary and
sufficient conditions for membership. For example, a bachelor is
an unmarried adult male:
Physical composition:

 The idea that one object can be part of another is a familiar

one.
 One's nose is part of one's head, Romania is part of Europe,
and this chapter is part of this book. We use the general
PartOf relation to say that one thing is part of another.
Objects can be grouped into part of hierarchies, reminiscent
of the Subset hierarchy:

Therefore, we can conclude PartOf (Bucharest, Earth).

Composition:
Composition implies a relationship where the child cannot exist
independent of the parent. Example: House (parent) and Room (child).
Rooms don't exist separate to a House.
COMPOSITE OBJECT:
 Categories of composite objects are often characterized by
structural relations among parts.
 For example, a biped has two legs attached to a body:
 BUNCH:
Define composite objects with definite parts but no particular
structure.
For example, if the apples are Applel, Apples, and Apples, then
BunchOf({Applel, Apples, Apples))
 Furthermore, BunchOf(App1es) is the composite object consisting
of all apples-not to be confused with Apples, the category or set of
all apples.
Logical minimization:

 Logical minimization, which means defining an object as the

smallest one satisfying certain conditions.
 Logic minimization is the application of algebraic axioms to a
binary function in order to reduce the number of digital variables
and/or rules needed to express the function; the technique is also
known as logic simplification or reduction
 BunchOf(s)


Measurements:
 In both scientific and commonsense theories of the world,
objects have height, mass, cost, and so on. The values that
we assign for these properties are called measures.
 Ordinary quantitative measures are quite easy to
represent.
 We imagine that the universe includes abstract "measure objects,"
such as the length that is the length of this line segment:
 We call length in 1.5 inches or 3.81 Centimeters.
  Similar axioms can be written for pounds and kilograms, seconds and days,
and dollars and cents. Measures can be used to describe objects as follows:

Substances and objects:

COUNT NOUNS:
Count nouns refer to people, places, and things that can be counted.
For example, twenty students, eight rooms, one box, and four socks
are all count nouns
MASS NOUNS:

Mass nouns, also known as “uncountable nouns” or “noncount nouns,”

are nouns representing something that cannot be counted. A mass noun
doesn’t have a plural form, like the popular mass noun examples blood
or clothing—it’s incorrect to say bloods or clothing’s. 

INTRINSIC:
 There are some properties that are intrinsic: they belong to the very
substance of the object, rather than to the object as a whole.
 When you cut a substance in half, the two pieces retain the same set of
intrinsic properties-things.
 Properties like density, boiling point, flavor, color, ownership, and so on.

EXTRINSIC:
On the other hand, extrinsic properties are the opposite: properties such as weight,
length, shape, function, and so on are not retained under subdivision.