Accomplishments and Products


The cornerstone of our approach to rapid knowledge formation is assembling knowledge bases from reusable components. Each component represents an entity, event, role or property. By instantiating and combining these components, complex representations can be built simply. For an overview of the approach, see our AAAI-97 paper and our K-Cap '01 paper.

To build the component library, we are developing a list of general, domain-independent concepts inspired by existing ontological and lexical resources. These include:

In the end, our component library will be well integrated and cross-indexed with many other resources, and it will add a level of detail and computational support that the others omit. We envision that the component library will be a valuable resource for projects in knowledge engineering, natural-language processing, information retrieval, and machine learning.

Our next step is representing each component in our formal language, KM. We are compiling a dictionary of semantic roles of five types:

These relations are based on Ken Barker's thorough analysis of case roles, and other relations, in his dissertation.

Our final step is writing the specifications and axioms for each component. For an event, the axioms include descriptions of the entities that participate in the event, as well as the pre-conditions and post-conditions of it. The axioms are written in our KM language, so they will enable KM to answer a wide range of questions, including ones that require simulation. Follow the link labeled "component library" (above) to see the specifications and axioms for all our current components.

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Last modified September 18, 2003