A knowledge representation system will include ways to store knowledge, ways to add new knowledge, and ways to query the knowledge. We can think of the interface as being two procedures:

• Tell(fact)
• Ask(question)

Tell and Ask will be front-end programs that access a database of facts in some knowledge representation language.

Either Tell or Ask (or both) may do inference :

• Ask(question) may do backward inference when the answer is implied but not explicit in the KB.
• Tell(fact) may do forward inference to derive additional facts from what it is told.

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