Science and Engineering in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

As a field, knowledge representation has often been accused of being off in a theoretical noman's land, removed from, and largely unrelated to, the central issues in AI. This article argues that recent trends in KR instead demonstrate the benefits of the interplay between science and engineering, a lesson from which all AI could benefit. This article grew out of a survey talk on the Third International Conference on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR '92) (Nebel, Rich, and Swartout 1992) that I presented at the Thirteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI '93). This article is an edited version of a talk surveying that conference, which I presented at the Thirteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI '93). Although nominally a conference overview, the article attempts to summarize the state of the conference and the field with respect to the intertwined goals of science and engineering.