High Performance Knowledge Bases

Mailing address:
AI Center
SRI International
333 Ravenswood Avenue
Menlo Park, CA 94025-3493

AIC Program:  Representation and Reasoning

Project home page at http://reliant.teknowledge.com/Projects/HPKB

The goal of this project was to enable knowledge engineers to construct knowledge bases (KBs) faster. To achieve this goal, we investigated two techniques: knowledge reuse and axiom templates. The results were demonstrated by developing a question answering system for the crisis management challenge problem (CMCP). The solution of the CMCP required addressing problems broader than just knowledge reuse and axiom templates. The technical issues addressed in the process can be broadly classified into two categories: knowledge base content development and knowledge server development.

We developed a geo-political KB for the CMCP. Specifically, we represented knowledge about international actions, terrorist groups, terrorist events, military capabilities, escalation and de-escalation of conflict, threats, etc. In the process of encoding the domain knowledge, we developed and adapted techniques for representing temporal knowledge and qualitative influences, and identified principles for taxonomy design.

The knowledge server development focused on extending several of our existing tools. Our theorem prover SNARK was extended to accept Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF) and a subset of OKBC knowledge model, to reason efficiently with Meta classes and temporal knowledge, and to produce explanations in HTML. We developed a worldwide web (WWW) interface to GKB-Editor, which is a graphical tool for browsing and editing KBs. We developed tools for translating, loading and saving ontologies encoded in a subset of KIF. The ontologies were loaded into Ocelot, which is a frame representation system developed at SRI. We extended our collaboration system to deal with schema changes and to synchronize the divergent copies of a KB. Instrumentation was developed to compute statistics on KB size, reuse, and axiom creation time.

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• Chaudhri, Vinay K. and Stickel, Mark E. and Thomere, Jerome F. and Waldinger, Richard J. Reusing Prior Knowledge: Problems and Solutions, in Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Jul 2000.  [PDF, Details]

• Chaudhri, Vinay K. and Lowrance, John D. and Stickel, Mark E. and Thomere, Jerome F. and Wadlinger, Richard J. Ontology Construction Toolkit, Technical Note Ontology. AI Center, SRI International, 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025, 2000.  [PDF, Details]

• Stickel, Mark E. and Waldinger, Richard J. and Chaudhri, Vinay K. A Guide to SNARK, Technical Note Unassigned. AI Center, SRI International, 333 Ravenswood Ave., Menlo Park, CA 94025, May 2000.  [PDF, Details]

• Pease, Adam and Chaudhri, Vinay and Lehman, Fritz and Farquhar, Adam. Practical Knowlege Representation and the DARPA High Performance Knowledge Base Project, in Seventh International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Breckenridge, CO, 2000.  [PDF, Details]

• Chaudhri, Vinay K. and Waldinger, Richard and Starr, Barbara and Good, Benjamin. Pragmatic Axiomatization Techniques, Technical Report . SRI International, 2000.  [PDF, Details]

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