An overview of the KL-ONE Knowledge Representation System

Abstract

KL-ONE is a system for representing knowledge in Artificial Intelligence programs. It has been developed and refined over a long period and has been used in both basic research and implemented knowledge-based systems in a number of places in the AI community. Here we present the kernel ideas of KL-ONE, emphasizing its ability to form complex structured descriptions. In addition to detailing all of KL-ONE's description-forming structures, we discuss a bit of the philosophy underlying the system, highlight notions of taxonomy and classification that are central to it, and include an extended example of the use of KL-ONE and its classifier in a recognition task.