The Logic of Knowledge Bases A Review

Hence, at a coarse-grained level of abstraction, KB-Ss can be characterized in terms of two components: (1) a knowledge base, encoding the knowledge embodied by the system, and (2) a reasoning engine, which is able to query the knowledge base, infer or acquire knowledge from external sources, and add new knowledge to the knowledge base. A knowledge-level account of a KBS (that is, a competencecentered, implementation-independent description of a system), such as Clancey's (1985) analysis of first-generation rule-based systems, focuses on the task-centered competence of the system; that is, it addresses issues such as what kind of problems the KBS is designed to tackle, what reasoning methods it uses, and what knowledge it requires. In contrast with task-centered analyses, Levesque and Lakemeyer focus on the competence of the knowledge base rather than that of the whole system. Hence, their notion of competence is a task-independent one: It is the "abstract state of knowledge" (p. This is an interesting assumption, which the "proceduralists" in the AI community might object to: According to the procedural viewpoint of knowledge representation, the knowledge modeled in an application, its representation, and the associated knowledge-retrieval mechanisms have to be engineered as As a result, they would argue, it is not possible to discuss the knowledge of a system independently of the task context in which the system is meant to operate.