Ronald J. Brachman

"In Artificial Intelligence, it is often said that the representation of knowledge is the key to the design of robust intelligent systems. In one form or another the principles of Knowledge Representation are fundamental to work in natural language processing, computer vision, knowledge-based expert systems, and other areas. The papers reprinted in this volume have been collected to allow the reader with a general technical background in AI to explore the subtleties of this key subarea. These seminal articles, spanning a quarter-century of research, cover the most important ideas and developments in the representation field. The editors introduce each paper, discuss its relevance and context, and provide an extensive bibliography of other work. "Readings in Knowledge Representation" is intended to serve as a complete sourcebook for the study of this crucial subject."

"Knowledge representation is at the very core of a radical idea for understanding intelligence. Instead of trying to understand or build brains from the bottom up, its goal is to understand and build intelligent behavior from the top down, putting the focus on what an agent needs to know in order to behave intelligently, how this knowledge can be represented symbolically, and how automated reasoning procedures can make this knowledge available as needed. This landmark text takes the central concepts of knowledge representation developed over the last 50 years and illustrates them in a lucid and compelling way. Each of the various styles of representation is presented in a simple and intuitive form, and the basics of reasoning with that representation are explained in detail. This approach gives readers a solid foundation for understanding the more advanced work found in the research literature. The presentation is clear enough to be accessible to a broad audience, including researchers and practitioners in database management, information retrieval, and object-oriented systems as well as artificial intelligence. This book provides the foundation in knowledge representation and reasoning that every AI practitioner needs."