Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

information systems continue to grow in size and scope, advances in data management become more and more on the critical path for usability of these systems. This paper reports on the implementation and applicability of an important function - that of calculating the conceptual salience of knowledge or data in a knowledge base or database. Salience is calculated with a method based on Tversky's formulation of salience as composed of two factors: intensity and discriminability. The salience computation has been implemented and tested on a database and is independent of the particular knowledge area.