as names reduces a set of attributes and their values to just the names. For example, consider the expression
{animal, food, mite, mould, pollen} in range [50, 5000]
This might have as its value for a particular case the attributes and ranges
Dog (65.11), Birch (63.60), Cat (52.1) and Timothy (52.1)
If we now apply the as names function we get
Dog, Birch, Cat and Timothy