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.

Papers direct the focus of interest to the development and use of conceptual models in information systems of various kinds and aim at improving awareness about general or specific problems and solutions in conceptual modelling.

This book explores the building of expert systems using logic for knowledge representation and meta-level inference for control. It presents research done by members of the expert systems group of the Department of Artificial Intelligence in Edinburgh, often in collaboration with others, based on two hypotheses: that logic is a suitable knowledge representation language, and that an explicit representation of the control regime of the theorem prover has many advantages. The editors introduce these hypotheses and present the arguments in their favor They then describe Socrates' a tool for the construction of expert systems that is based on these assumptions. They devote the remaining chapters to the solution of problems that arise from the restrictions imposed by Socrates's representation language and from the system's inefficiency. The chapters dealing with the representation problem present a reified approach to temporal logic that makes it possible to use nonstandard logics without extending the system, and describe a general proof method for arbitrary modal logics. Those dealing with the efficiency problem discuss the technique of partial evaluation and its limitations, as well as another possible solution known as assertion-time inference. Peter Jackson is a Senior Scientist in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Sciences at the McDonnell Douglas Research Laboratory in St. Louis. Han Reichgelt is a Lecturer in Department of Psychology at the University of Nottingham. Frank van Harmelen is a Research Fellow in the Mathematical Reasoning Group at the University of Edinburgh.

Within the last three decades, information modelling and knowledge bases have become essential subjects, not only for academic communities related to information systems and computer science, but also for businesses where information technology is applied. This book presents the proceedings of EJC 2014, the 24th International Conference on Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases, held in Kiel, Germany, in June 2014. The main themes of the conference were: conceptual modelling, including modelling and specification languages, domain specific conceptual modelling, and validating and communicating conceptual models; knowledge and information modelling and discovery, including knowledge representation and knowledge management, advanced data mining and analysis methods, as well as information recognition and information modelling; linguistics modelling; cross-cultural communication and social computing; environmental modelling; and multimedia data modelling and systems, which includes modelling multimedia information and knowledge, content-based multimedia data management, content-based multimedia retrieval as well as privacy and context enhancing technologies. This book will be of interest to all those who wish to keep abreast of new developments in the field of information modelling and knowledge bases.

Reasoning about knowledge—particularly the knowledge of agents who reason about the world and each other's knowledge—was once the exclusive province of philosophers and puzzle solvers. More recently, this type of reasoning has been shown to play a key role in a surprising number of contexts, from understanding conversations to the analysis of distributed computer algorithms. Reasoning About Knowledge is the first book to provide a general discussion of approaches to reasoning about knowledge and its applications to distributed systems, artificial intelligence, and game theory. It brings eight years of work by the authors into a cohesive framework for understanding and analyzing reasoning about knowledge that is intuitive, mathematically well founded, useful in practice, and widely applicable. The book is almost completely self-contained and should be accessible to readers in a variety of disciplines, including computer science, artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science, and game theory. Each chapter includes exercises and bibliographic notes.

The use of mathematical logic as a formalism for artificial intelligence was recognized by John McCarthy in 1959 in his paper on Programs with Common Sense. In a series of papers in the 1960's he expanded upon these ideas and continues to do so to this date. It is now 41 years since the idea of using a formal mechanism for AI arose. It is therefore appropriate to consider some of the research, applications and implementations that have resulted from this idea. In early 1995 John McCarthy suggested to me that we have a workshop on Logic-Based Artificial Intelligence (LBAI). In June 1999, the Workshop on Logic-Based Artificial Intelligence was held as a consequence of McCarthy's suggestion. The workshop came about with the support of Ephraim Glinert of the National Science Foundation (IIS-9S2013S), the American Association for Artificial Intelligence who provided support for graduate students to attend, and Joseph JaJa, Director of the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies who provided both manpower and financial support, and the Department of Computer Science. We are grateful for their support. This book consists of refereed papers based on presentations made at the Workshop. Not all of the Workshop participants were able to contribute papers for the book. The common theme of papers at the workshop and in this book is the use of logic as a formalism to solve problems in AI.

This sixth IMKB volume attempts to synthesize research done over a longer period of time in a reference book format. The work presents in survey articles the efforts to study foundations and applications of conceptual modelling in various environments. The motivation of these efforts is the fact that conceptual modelling and knowledge representation together with various kinds of inference systems are important subfields in the design and use of information systems. The modelling problem is essential in many disciplines, such as database design, knowledge engineering, logic, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, philosophy, linguistics, etc. A central and comprehensive bibliography is included.