A Representation System User Interface for Knowledge Base Designers

A major strength of frame-based knowledge representation languages is their ability to provide the knowledge base designer with a concise and intuitively appealing means expression. To be effective as a knowledge base development tool, a language needs to be supported by an implementation that facilitates creating, browsing, debugging, and editing the descriptions in the knowledge base. We have focused on providing such support in a SmallTalk (Ingalls, 1978) implementation of the KL-ONE knowledge representation language (Brachman, 1978), called KloneTalk, that has been in use by several projects for over a year at Xerox PARC. In this note, we describe those features of KloneTalk's displaybased interface that have made it an effective knowledge base development tool, including the use of constraints to automatically determine descriptions of newly created data base items.