Re: KIF
Ramesh Patil <ramesh@isi.edu>
Message-id: <9201071628.AA27500@quark.isi.edu>
To: dam@ai.mit.edu (David McAllester)
Cc: interlingua@isi.edu
Reply-To: ramesh@isi.edu
Subject: Re: KIF
In-reply-to: Your message of Tue, 07 Jan 92 11:12:58 -0500.
<9201071612.AA03111@raisin-bran>
Date: Tue, 07 Jan 92 08:28:26 PST
From: Ramesh Patil <ramesh@isi.edu>
Dave,
> Another interest of mine involves the value of higher order logic.
> First order logic is far weaker that most AI researchers seem to
> appreciate. For example, first order logic can not express the concept of
> transitive closure, or the concept of a finite path in a graph.
> Any universal standard for a knowledge representation language should,
> it seems to me, be able to express these concepts. As with recursion,
> I have not found people involved with KIF who are interested in role
> of higher order logic in knowledge representation.
> David McAllester
On the contrary, there is a growing interest in higher order logic,
or at least a carefully chosen subset of higher order logic that
will allow us to naturally represent many of the everyday sort of
statements (and allow reasonable inferences from them). The
interest in this area is not only limited to KIF but is also a
concern in other areas of knowledge sharing efforts. In particular,
the KRSS group (which because it deals with KL-ONE family of
languages) has a number of higher order statements to deal with from
the very start.
Furthermore, the efforts of the knowledge sharing activity is only
one part of the overall efforts to come to grips with knowledge
representation, sharing and exchange. There are many in the
community who will agree that there is some (definite) role for
higher order logic in the knowledge representation or interchange
language. What is needed is to identify what higher order
constructs are needed, and how to define a language that allows
these and still makes our task of reasoning with and exchange of
knowledge bases possible.
- ramesh