Thls article deals with the interpretation of conceptual operations underlying the communicative use of natural language (NL) within the Structured Inheritance Network (Sl-Nets) paradigm. The operations are reduced to functions of a f o ~ a l language, thus changing the level of abstraction of the operations to be performed on SI-Nets. In this sense, operations on SI-Nets are not merely isomorphic to single epistemologleal objects, but can be viewed as a simulation of processes on a different level, that pertaining to the conceptual system of NL. For this purpose, we have designed a version of KL-ONE which represents.
