Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

Much intelligent behavior is based on the use of knowledge; humans spend a third of their useful lives becoming educated. There is not yet a clear understanding of how the brain represents knowledge.

There are several important issues in knowledge representation:

• how knowledge is stored;

• how knowledge that is applicable to the current problem can be retrieved;

• how reasoning can be performed to derive information that is implied by existing knowledge but not stored directly.

The storage and reasoning mechanisms are usually closely coupled.