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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 much bigger 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, KRSS, SRKB, 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 [15] which is based on first order logic with some extensions to support non-mono reason and definitions. KIF includes both a specification of a syntax for the language as well as a specification for the semantics. KIF can be used to support the translation from one content language to another or as a common content language between two agents which use different native representation languages. Information of KIF and associated tools and is available from http:.cs.umbc.edu .

The KRSS Group (Knowledge Representation System Specification) is focussed 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 SRKB Group (Shared, Reusable Knowledge Bases) is concerned with facilitating consensus on contents 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 interactions between knowledge based systems and other modules in a run-time environment. 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 [26]. The KQML language is one of the main results which have come out of the external interfaces group of the KSE. General information is available from http:.cs.umbc.edu/kqml.