Abstract: A method and apparatus for mapping concepts and attributes to distance fields via rvachev-functions. The steps including generating, for a plurality of objects, equations representing boundaries of attributes for each respective object, converting, for a plurality of objects, the equations into greater than or equal to zero type inequalities, generating, for a plurality of objects, a logical expression combining regions of space defined by the inequalities into a semantic entity, and substituting, for a plurality of objects, the logical expression with a corresponding rvachev-function such that the resulting rvachev-function is equal to 0 on a boundary of the semantic entity, greater then 0 inside a region of the semantic entity, and less then 0 outside the region of the semantic entity. Also included is the step of generating a composite rvachev-function representing logical statements corresponding to the plurality of objects using the respective rvachev-functions of the objects.

Abstract: The invention provides a fast approximate as well as exact hierarchical network storage and retrieval system and method for encoding and indexing graphs or networks into a data structure called the Cognitive Signature for property based, analog based or structure or sub-structure based search. The system and method produce a Cognitive Memory from a multiplicity of stored Cognitive Signatures and are ideally suited to store and index all or parts of massive data sets, linguistic graphs, protein graphs, chemical graphs, graphs of biochemical pathways, image or picture graphs as well as dynamical graphs such as traffic graphs or flows and motion picture sequences of graphs. The system and method have the advantage that properties of the Cognitive Signature of the graph can be used in correlations to the properties of the underlying data making the system ideal for semantic indexing of massive scale graph data sets.