Contact The MIT Press Information on how to order from The MIT Press Access your saved shopping cart, e-mail list subscriptions, order history, address book, and other info in the Your Profile area MIT Press Home Page


February 2001
7 x 9, 300 pp., 17 illus.
$52.00/£38.95 (CLOTH)
Short

ISBN-10:
0-262-12232-4
ISBN-13:
978-0-262-12232-0

Related Links
Open this site in a new browser window.
Find this book in a library
The Logic of Knowledge Bases
Hector J. Levesque and Gerhard Lakemeyer

Table of Contents and Sample Chapters

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.




See Other Titles In:
Cognition, Brain, & Behavior
 Computational Intelligence
Computer Science and Intelligent Systems
 Artificial Intelligence
 Databases
 General
 
Join an E-mail Alert List


 
 
TECHNOLOGY PARTNER: Azility, Inc. TERMS OF USE | PRIVACY POLICY | COPYRIGHT © 2009