What is "vivification"

Vivification \Viv`i*fi*ca"tion\, n. [L. vivificatio: cf. vivification.]

1. The act of vivifying, or the state of being vivified; restoration of life; revival.
   --Bacon.

2. (Physiol.) One of the changes of assimilation, in which proteid matter which has been transformed, and made a part of the tissue or tissue cells, is endowed with life, and thus enabled to manifest the phenomena of irritability, contractility, etc.
   --McKendrick.

3. (Chem.) The act or process of vivificating. [Obs.]

n. The giving of life; vitalization; animation.

1. n. quality of being active or spirited or alive and vigorous [syn: animation, spiritedness, invigoration, brio]

2. the activity of giving vitality and vigour to something [syn: invigoration, animation]

Vivification is an operation on a description logic knowledge base to improve performance of a semantic reasoner. Vivification replaces a disjunction of concepts C ⊔ C… ⊔ C by the least common subsumer of the concepts C, C, …C.

The goal of this operation is to improve the performance of the reasoner by replacing a complex set of concepts with a single concept which subsumes the original concepts.

For example, consider the example given in (Cohen 92): Suppose we have the concept PIANIST(Jill) ∨ ORGANIST(Jill). This concept can be vivified into a simpler concept KEYBOARD-PLAYER(Jill). This summarization leads to an approximation that may not be exactly equivalent to the original.