Handbook of Knowledge Representation describes the essential foundations of Knowledge Representation, which lies at the core of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The book provides an up-to-date review of twenty-five key topics in knowledge representation, written by the leaders of each field. It includes a tutorial background and cutting-edge developments, as well as applications of Knowledge Representation in a variety of AI systems. This handbook is organized into three parts. Part I deals with general methods in Knowledge Representation and reasoning and covers such topics as classical logic in Knowledge Representation; satisfiability solvers; description logics; constraint programming; conceptual graphs; nonmonotonic reasoning; model-based problem solving; and Bayesian networks. Part II focuses on classes of knowledge and specialized representations, with chapters on temporal representation and reasoning; spatial and physical reasoning; reasoning about knowledge and belief; temporal action logics; and nonmonotonic causal logic. Part III discusses Knowledge Representation in applications such as question answering; the semantic web; automated planning; cognitive robotics; multi-agent systems; and knowledge engineering. This book is an essential resource for graduate students, researchers, and practitioners in knowledge representation and AI. * Make your computer smarter* Handle qualitative and uncertain information* Improve computational tractability to solve your problems easily

Knowledge representation is at the very core of a radical idea for understanding intelligence. This book talks about the central concepts of knowledge representation developed over the years. It is suitable for researchers and practitioners in database management, information retrieval, object-oriented systems and artificial intelligence.

This book provides a de?nition and study of a knowledge representation and r- soning formalism stemming from conceptual graphs, while focusing on the com- tational properties of this formalism. Knowledge can be symbolically represented in many ways. The knowledge representation and reasoning formalism presented here is a graph formalism – knowledge is represented by labeled graphs, in the graph theory sense, and r- soning mechanisms are based on graph operations, with graph homomorphism at the core. This formalism can thus be considered as related to semantic networks. Since their conception, semantic networks have faded out several times, but have always returned to the limelight. They faded mainly due to a lack of formal semantics and the limited reasoning tools proposed. They have, however, always rebounded - cause labeled graphs, schemas and drawings provide an intuitive and easily und- standable support to represent knowledge. This formalism has the visual qualities of any graphic model, and it is logically founded. This is a key feature because logics has been the foundation for knowledge representation and reasoning for millennia. The authors also focus substantially on computational facets of the presented formalism as they are interested in knowledge representation and reasoning formalisms upon which knowledge-based systems can be built to solve real problems. Since object structures are graphs, naturally graph homomorphism is the key underlying notion and, from a computational viewpoint, this moors calculus to combinatorics and to computer science domains in which the algorithmicqualitiesofgraphshavelongbeenstudied,asindatabasesandconstraint networks.

Medicine and health care are currently faced with a significant rise in their complexity. This is partly due to the progress made during the past three decades in the fundamental biological understanding of the causes of health and disease at the molecular, (sub)cellular, and organ level. Since the end of the 1970s, when knowledge representation and reasoning in the biomedical field became a separate area of research, huge progress has been made in the development of methods and tools that are finally able to impact on the way medicine is being practiced. Even though there are huge differences in the techniques and methods used by biomedical researchers, there is now an increasing tendency to share research results in terms of formal knowledge representation methods, such as ontologies, statistical models, network models, and mathematical models. As there is an urgent need for health-care professionals to make better decisions, computer-based support using this knowledge is now becoming increasingly important. It may also be the only way to integrate research results from the different parts of the spectrum of biomedical and clinical research. The aim of this book is to shed light on developments in knowledge representation at different levels of biomedical application, ranging from human biology to clinical guidelines, and using different techniques, from probability theory and differential equations to logic. The book starts with two introductory chapters followed by 18 contributions organized in the following topical sections: diagnosis of disease; monitoring of health and disease and conformance; assessment of health and personalization; prediction and prognosis of health and disease; treatment of disease; and recommendations.

This book describes in detail the relationship between symbolic representations of knowledge and abstract states of knowledge, exploring along the way the foundations of knowledge, knowledge bases, knowledge-based systems, and knowledge representation and reasoning. The idea of knowledge bases lies at the heart of symbolic, or "traditional," artificial intelligence. A knowledge-based system decides how to act by running formal reasoning procedures over a body of explicitly represented knowledge—a knowledge base. The system is not programmed for specific tasks; rather, it is told what it needs to know and expected to infer the rest. This book is about the logic of such knowledge bases. It describes in detail the relationship between symbolic representations of knowledge and abstract states of knowledge, exploring along the way the foundations of knowledge, knowledge bases, knowledge-based systems, and knowledge representation and reasoning. Assuming some familiarity with first-order predicate logic, the book offers a new mathematical model of knowledge that is general and expressive yet more workable in practice than previous models. The book presents a style of semantic argument and formal analysis that would be cumbersome or completely impractical with other approaches. It also shows how to treat a knowledge base as an abstract data type, completely specified in an abstract way by the knowledge-level operations defined over it.

Intended both as a text for advanced undergraduates and graduate students, and as a key reference work for AI researchers and developers, Logical Foundations of Artificial Intelligence is a lucid, rigorous, and comprehensive account of the fundamentals of artificial intelligence from the standpoint of logic. The first section of the book introduces the logicist approach to AI--discussing the representation of declarative knowledge and featuring an introduction to the process of conceptualization, the syntax and semantics of predicate calculus, and the basics of other declarative representations such as frames and semantic nets. This section also provides a simple but powerful inference procedure, resolution, and shows how it can be used in a reasoning system. The next several chapters discuss nonmonotonic reasoning, induction, and reasoning under uncertainty, broadening the logical approach to deal with the inadequacies of strict logical deduction. The third section introduces modal operators that facilitate representing and reasoning about knowledge. This section also develops the process of writing predicate calculus sentences to the metalevel--to permit sentences about sentences and about reasoning processes. The final three chapters discuss the representation of knowledge about states and actions, planning, and intelligent system architecture. End-of-chapter bibliographic and historical comments provide background and point to other works of interest and research. Each chapter also contains numerous student exercises (with solutions provided in an appendix) to reinforce concepts and challenge the learner. A bibliography and index complete this comprehensive work.