KRYPTON: Integrating Terminology and Assertion

Abstract

The demands placed on a knowledge representation scheme by a knowl-edge-based system are generally not all met by any of today’s can-didates. Representation languages based on frames or semantic net-works have intuitive appeal for forming descriptions but tend to have severely limited assertional power, and are often fraught with am-biguous readings. Those based on first-order logic are less limited assertionally, but are restricted to primitive, unrelated terms. We have attempted to overcome these limitations in a new, hybrid knowledge representation system, called “KRYPTON”. KRYPTON has two rep-resentation languages, a frame-based one for forming domain-specific descriptive terms and a logic-based one for making statements about the world. We here summarize the two languages, a functional inter-face to the system, and an implementation in terms of a taxonomy of frames and its interaction with a first-order theorem prover.