Interpreting Network Formalisms

Introduction

In a recent paper, Reiter and Criscuolo remark “that (semantic) networks are notational variants of logical formulae is by now a truism in Artificial Intelligence circles”. Shamelessly exploiting the foregoing quote as a pretext, I attempt to sketch adequate semantic accounts for at least two (kinds of) semantic network formalisms; one, based on the notion of inheritance, one, not. A crucial condition of adequacy to be satisfied is fidelity to some of the intuitions of the creators of the formalisms.