Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

By Dr. Ronald Brachman and Hector Levesque

"This book clearly and concisely distills decades of work in AI on representing information in an efficient and general manner. The information is valuable not only for AI researchers, but also for people working on logical databases, XML, and the semantic web: read this book, and avoid reinventing the wheel!" --Henry Kautz, University of Washington"Brachman and Levesque describe better than I have seen elsewhere, the range of formalisms between full first order logic at its most expressive and formalisms that compromise expressiveness for computation speed. Theirs are the most even-handed explanations I have seen." --John McCarthy, Stanford"This textbook makes teaching my KR course much easier. It provides a solid foundation and starting point for further studies. While it does not (and cannot) cover all the topics that I tackle in an advanced course on KR, it provides the basics and the background assumptions behind KR research. Together with current research literature, it is the perfect choice for a graduate KR course." --Bernhard Nebel, University of Freiburg"This is a superb, clearly written, comprehensive overview of nearly all the major issues, ideas, and techniques of this important branch of artificial intelligence, written by two of the masters of the field. The examples are well chosen, and the explanations are illuminating.Thank you for giving me this opportunity to review and praise a book that has sorely been needed by the KRR community." --Bill Rapaport, University at Buffalo"A concise and lucid exposition of the major topics in knowledge representation, from two of the leading authorities in the field. It provides a thorough grounding, a wide variety of useful examples and exercises, and some thought-provoking new ideas for the expert reader." --Stuart Russell, UC Berkeley"Brachman and Levesque have laid much of the foundations of the field of knowledge representation and reasoning. This textbook provides a lucid and comprehensive introduction to the field. It is written with the same clarity and gift for exposition as their many research publications. The text will become an invaluable resource for students and researchers alike." --Bart Selman, Cornell University"KR&R is known as "core AI" for a reason -- it embodies some of the most basic conceptualizations and technical approaches in the field. And no researchers are more qualified to provide an in-depth introduction to the area than Brachman and Levesque, who have been at the forefront of KR&R for two decades. The book is clearly written, and is intelligently comprehensive. This is the definitive book on KR&R, and it is long overdue." --Yoav Shoham, Stanford University

• 1 Introduction * 2 The Language of First-Order Logic *3 Expressing Knowledge * 4 Resolution * 5 Horn Logic * 6 Procedural Control of Reasoning * 7 Rules in Production Systems * 8 Object-Oriented Representation * 9 Structured Descriptions * 10 Inheritance * 11 Numerical Uncertainty *12 Defaults *13 Abductive Reasoning *14 Actions * 15 Planning *16 A Knowledge Representation Tradeoff * Bibliography * Index