Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To quote Crosby, Stills, and Nash (and perhaps date ourselves), “It's been a long time comin'.” The impetus for this book goes back to a tutorial on knowledge representation that we presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Karlsruhe, in 1983. In the process of preparing that overview of the field and a subsequent collection of readings that grew out of it, we began to see research in the area as primarily an attempt to reconcile two conflicting goals: to represent knowledge (and especially, incomplete knowledge) as generally as possible, and to reason with it in an automated way as efficiently as possible. This was an idea that surfaced in some of our own research papers of the time, but ...