Disadvantages of Frames

Frames encourage baroque representations; little guide to good structuring of a domain.

Some things that can be represented in logic cannot be represented well -- or at all -- in frames:[Michael Genesereth, lecture presented at Stanford.]

  1. Slot fillers must be ``real'' data. For example, it is not possible to say that John is a butcher or a baker, since there is no way to deal with a disjunction in a slot filler.

  2. It is not possible to quantify over slots. For example, there is no way to represent ``Some student made 100 on the exam''.

  3. It is necessary to repeat the same information to make it usable from different viewpoints, since methods are associated with slots or particular object types. (For example, it may be easy to answer ``whom does John love?'' but hard to answer ``who loves Mary?''.)

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