Publication Details

OKBC: A Programmatic Foundation for Knowledge Base Interoperability

by Chaudhri, Vinay K. and Farquhar, Adam and Fikes, Richard and Karp, Peter D. and Rice, James P.

in Proceedings of the AAAI-98

Address: Madison, WI
1998.

The technology for building large knowledge bases (KBs) is yet to witness a breakthrough so that a KB can be constructed by the assembly of prefabricated knowledge components. Most of the current KB development tools can only manipulate knowledge residing in the knowledge representation system (KRS) for which the tools were originally developed. Open Knowledge Base Connectivity (OKBC) is an application programming interface for accessing KRSs, and was developed to enable the construction of reusable KB tools. OKBC improves upon its predecessor, the Generic Frame Protocol (GFP), in several significant ways. In this paper, we discuss technical design issues faced in the development of OKBC, highlight how OKBC improves upon GFP, and report on practical experiences in using it.