The Knowledge Sharing Effort

The ARPA Knowledge Sharing Effort (KSE) is a consortium to develop conventions facilitating sharing and reuse of knowledge bases and knowledge--based systems. Its goal is to define, develop, and test infrastructure and supporting technology, to enable participants to build larger and more broadly functional systems than could be achieved working alone. The KSE is organized around four working groups, each of which addresses a complementary problem identified in current knowledge representation technology: Interlingua, Knowledge Representation System Specification, Shared, Reusable Knowledge Bases, and External Interfaces.

The Interlingua Group is developing a common language for expressing the content of a knowledge-base. This group has published a specification document describing the Knowledge Interchange Formalism or KIF [], which is based on first order logic with extensions to support non-mono reason and definitions. KIF provides both a specification for the syntax of a language, and a specification for its semantics. KIF can be used to support translation from one content language to another, or as a common content language between two agents that use different native representation languages. Information about KIF and associated tools is available from http:.cs.umbc.edu.

The Knowledge Representation System Specification Group (KRSS) focuses on defining common constructs within families of representation languages. It has recently finished a common specification for terminological representations in the KL-ONE family. This document and other information on the KRSS group is available as http:....

The Shared, Reusable Knowledge Bases Group (SRKB) is concerned with facilitating consensus on the content of shar knowledge bases, with sub-interests in shared knowledge for particular topic areas and in topic-independent development tools and methodologies. It has established a repository for sharable ontologies and tools, which is available over the Internet as http:.cs.umbc.edu.

The scope of the External Interfaces Group is the run-time interaction between knowledge--based systems and other modules. Special attention has been given to two important cases-communication between two knowledge-based systems and communication between a knowledge-based system and a conventional database management system []. The KQML language is one of the main results to come out of the external interfaces group of the KSE. General information is available from http:.cs.umbc.edu/kqml.

finin@ISRulesCsNot