Query: Status of KIF-related standards efforts

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Message-id: <kj4UNy_8XZwyQ2Ge0E@pitt.edu>
Date: Mon,  9 Jan 1995 23:01:02 -0500 (EST)
From: Daniel D Suthers <suthers+@pitt.edu>
To: srkb@cs.umbc.edu
Subject: Query: Status of KIF-related standards efforts
Sender: owner-srkb@cs.umbc.edu
Precedence: bulk

Could someone update me concerning the status of the KIF-related
standards mentioned in the enclosure below. (Is the draft proposal
available; what's the future look like for it, etc.)

Thanks in advance -- Dan Suthers

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Date: Wed, 29 Jun 94 21:45:37 -0400
From: sowa@ranch.poly.edu (John F. Sowa)
Message-id: <9406300145.AA19513@ranch.poly.edu>
To: cg@cs.umn.edu, interlingua@ISI.EDU, kr-advisory@ISI.EDU, srkb@ISI.EDU
Subject: Proposed standards for KIF and CGs
Cc: sowa@ranch.poly.edu, sowa@turing.pacss.binghamton.edu
Sender: srkb-owner@cs.umbc.edu
Precedence: bulk

At last month's meeting of the ANSI OMC (Operations Management Committee),
the recommendations from the April meeting of X3T2 were approved:

 1. The name of the X3T2 committee has been changed to "Information
    Interchange and Interpretation."  The new name reflects the concerns
    for both information sharing (Interchange) and the semantics of the
    information (Interpretation).

 2. The two new work items for developing standards for the Knowledge
    Interchange Format (KIF) and for conceptual graphs (CGs) were
    approved.  Draft proposed standards for both of them have been
    promised by December 1994.  Mike Genesereth is the editor for the
    KIF proposal, and John Sowa is the editor for the CG proposal.

... 
Both of them contain the barest minimum needed for defining and
representing all existing paradigms:

 1. The basic Boolean operators:  and, or, not, implies, equivalence,
    and any others that are definable in terms of them, such as nand,
    nor, and exclusive or.

 2. The two basic quantifiers:  the existential and universal.

 3. Definitional mechanisms based on lambda calculus.

 4. Metalanguage capabilities that are necessary for defining themselves
    and all other formal languages, logics, and computing paradigms.

 5. Syntax, rules of inference, and model-theoretic semantics.

Everything else goes into the ontologies, which strictly speaking are
not part of either KIF or CGs, but which are definable in terms of them.
That includes ontologies for time, procedures, formal grammars, abstract
automata, Petri nets, algebraic structures, contexts, object-oriented
encapsulations, distributed agents, etc.  Defining ontologies for every
one of these systems is NOT part of the KIF and CG work items, but some
of them will have to be defined for the knowledge sharing effort and for
the ANSI and ISO CSMF project.
... etc
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Dan Suthers            	| Learning Research & Development Center
suthers+@pitt.edu      	| University of Pittsburgh
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