pinion of many that
the best way to handle the multivalent relations in ontologies is with
hypergraphs. A first order IFF type <span style="font-style: italic;">language
</span>is a kind of aligned
hypergraph. It consists of sets for variables, entity types
corresponding to hypergraph nodes, and relation types corresponding to
hyperedges, and functions for defining the reference, signature and
arity of relation types. In contrast to the notion of a hypergraph, a
type language is aligned along its reference 