franka@tekcad.UUCP (12/07/83)
#N:tekcad:3600003:000:843
tekcad!franka Dec 7 08:27:00 1983
OK, some of you have expressed a dislike for "non-technical, philo-
sophical, etc." discussions on this newsgroup. So for those of you who are
tired of this, I pose a technical question for you to talk about:
What is your favorite method of representing knowlege in a KBS?
Do you depend on frames, atoms of data jumbled together randomly, or something
in between? Do you have any packages (for public consumption which run on
machines that most of us have access to) that aid people in setting up knowlege
bases?
I think that this should keep this newsgroup talking at least partially
technically for a while. No need to thank me. I just view it as a public ser-
vice.
From the truly menacing,
/- -\ but usually underestimated,
<-> Frank Adrian
(tektronix!tekcad!franka)rggoebel@watdaisy.UUCP (Randy Goebel) (12/16/83)
Bob Kowalski has said that the only way to represent knowledge is using first order logic. ACM SIGART Newsletter No. 70, February 1980 surveys many of the people in the world actually doing representation research, and few of them agree with Kowalski. Is there anyone out there than can substantiate a claim for actually ``representing'' (what ever that means) ``knowledge?'' Most of the knowledge representation schemes I've seen are really deductive information description languages with quasi-formal extensions. I don't have a good definition of what knowledge is...but ask any mathematical logician (or mathematical philosopher) what they think about calling something like KRL a knowledge representation language. Randy Goebel Logic Programming Group University of Waterloo Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA N2L 3G1