luntzel@CSL.SRI.COM (Elizabeth Luntzel) (11/05/87)
SRI COMPUTER SCIENCE LAB SEMINAR ANNOUNCEMENT:
KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION WITH CONCEPTUAL GRAPHS
John F. Sowa
IBM Systems Research
and Stanford University
Wednesday, November 11 at 4:00 pm
SRI International, Computer Science Laboratory, Room A113B
Conceptual graphs form a complete system of logic designed to map
as simply as possible to and from natural languages. Like the predicate
calculus, they are general enough to represent anything that can be
represented in rules, frames, and other languages. But they also have
certain formal and practical advantages over the predicate calculus.
Their formal advantages arise from their treatment of objects, contexts,
and sets. Their practical advantages arise from the standard guidelines
they provide for mapping to and from natural languages. Because of their
generality and flexibility, they have been used as the knowledge
representation language for a variety of applications, including planning,
information retrieval, and interfaces between heterogeneous databases and
knowledge bases. This talk will introduce conceptual graphs and show how
they handle a variety of knowledge representation tasks.
John Sowa is a member of the IBM Systems Research Institute in Thornwood,
New York. This fall, he has been visiting the IBM Palo Alto Scientific
Center and teaching a course in the Stanford Computer Science Department.
His work on conceptual graphs has appeared in his book, Conceptual
Structures (Addison-Wesley, 1984), and a new collection of papers on
conceptual graphs will be released in the spring of 1988.
NOTE FOR VISITORS TO SRI:
Please arrive at least 10 minutes early in order to sign in and
be shown to the conference room.
SRI is located at 333 Ravenswood Avenue in Menlo Park. Visitors
may park in the visitors lot in front of Building A (red brick
building at 333 Ravenswood Ave) or in the conference parking area
at the corner of Ravenswood and Middlefield. The seminar room is in
Building A. Visitors should sign in at the reception desk in the
Building A lobby.
IMPORTANT: Visitors from Communist Bloc countries should make the
necessary arrangements with Fran Leonard (415-859-4124) in SRI Security
as soon as possible.
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