tim@LINC.CIS.UPENN.EDU (Tim Finin) (08/09/87)
Date: Wed, 5 Aug 87 12:18 EDT
From: The Mad Debugger <emerson@uvm-gen.UUCP>
Subject: FBRL in Prolog
Does anyone know of any FBRL's written in Prolog or that support logical
inference? I know HSRL (from Carnegie-Mellon) and KRYPTON (from
XEROX PARC) have a logical basis to them, but both are written in LISP.
I am currently writing a FBRL interpreter embedded in C-Prolog, and would
like to ''compare notes'' with other such systems, if they're out there.
I would also appreciate any thoughts on the implementation of frame theory
in Prolog.
Thanks in advance,
Tom E.
You may want to start by looking at Pat Hay's paper "The Logic of
Frames" from the mid to late seventies. He gives a logical account
for the semantics underlying the basic ideas in FBRL's. The paper is
reprinted in Brachman and Levesque's book "Readings in Knowledge
Representation" published by Morgan Kaufmann (1985).
I can point you toward three things involving FBRLs in Prolog that you
may want to look at:
[1] WIth a group from RCA, I built a frame-based representation
language in prolog called PINE. We used it to build an expert system
for diagnosing faults in ATE equipment. It is described in:
FOREST - An Expert System for Automatic Test Equipment; Tim Finin, Pamela
Kleinosky and John McAdams; Proceedings of the First Conference on
Artificial Intelligence Applications; (IEEE), Denver, Colorado, 1984.
A somewhat longer version is available as
technical report MS-CIS-84-09, Dept. of Computer and Information Science,
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA 19104
[2] Arity Corp offers an expert systems building toolkit (written by
David Drager) which is based on a FBRL. It's written in Arity Prolog,
of course. It is really quite powerful. I'd characterize it as a
cross between EMYCIN and KEE.
[3] The AI research group at UNISYS's Paoli Research Lab has been
using a FBRL implemented in Prolog to build many of their expert
systems for quite some time. There system is called KNET and is
similar to KL-ONE. An early reference is:
KNET - A logic Based Associative Network Framework for Expert
Systems"; Freeman, M., L. Hirschman and D. McKay; SDC, A Burroughs
Company; technical memo LBS 12; Sept. 1983.
I believe that there are several descriptions of it in the open
literature, but I'm not sure where they can be found.
Tim