SHEBS@UTAH-20.ARPA (08/29/84)
From: Stan Shebs <SHEBS@UTAH-20.ARPA> Some of the most recent KR systems attempt to provide meta-taxonomies; I know of RLL/Eurisko, MRS, and AGE, all Stanford products. Am not sure what LOOPS provides in the way of knowledge about representation schemes (although one could build something to recommend whether a given piece of information should be a logical assertion, an object, an instance variable of an object, Lisp code, etc). Meta-taxonomies are HARD. The ability to create a taxonomy of some body of knowledge implies that one has both a deep and broad understanding of that body. The creation of a meta-taxonomy implies that there is a similar ***Sender closed connection*** === Network Mail from host sri-ai.arpa on Fri Aug 31 12:30:23 ===
SHEBS@UTAH-20.ARPA (08/29/84)
From: Stan Shebs <SHEBS@UTAH-20.ARPA>
Some of the most recent KR systems attempt to provide meta-taxonomies;
I know of RLL/Eurisko, MRS, and AGE, all Stanford products. Am not
sure what LOOPS provides in the way of knowledge about representation
schemes (although one could build something to recommend whether a given
piece of information should be a logical assertion, an object, an instance
variable of an object, Lisp code, etc).
Meta-taxonomies are HARD. The ability to create a taxonomy of some body of
knowledge implies that one has both a deep and broad understanding of that
body. The creation of a meta-taxonomy implies that there is a similar
level of understanding for many issues in knowledge representation, which
is definitely *not* the case. We're still lacking adequate theories of
multiple inheritance, nor have we plumbed the depths of strange logical
systems. Looking at library science is an interesting idea; while I
imagine that many of the classification schemes are informal (probably
relying on human judgement), librarians have been classifying massive
databases (books) for a long time.
Moving farther afield, taxonomies in other AI areas are lacking. I asked
a while back about taxonomies for rule systems, and found that there was
about one paper, by Davis and King in a ca. 1976 MI. This, however, was
an informal taxonomy, and not particularly susceptible to mechanization.
Am still waiting for a tree that puts OPS5, Emycin, and Prolog on
different leaves...
stan