Fabricating Monsters is Hard Towards the Automation of Conceptual Blending

The theory of conceptual blending has been applied very successfully in cognitive science to explain the process of concept generation. In previous work, we have shown a formalisation and implementation of conceptual blending that is borrowing techniques from logic, ontological engineering, and algebraic specification. However, so far our attempts (and similar approaches in the literature) have been reconstructive; that is they show how a particular concept (e.g., houseboat) can be ‘discovered’ by computationally blending two carefully selected input spaces (e.g, a house and a boat) and a suitable base. This paper describes an attempt to take the next step and automate the concept generation based on a database of input spaces. Particularly, we attempt to create monsters from a library of animals formalised as OWL ontologies.