KRYPTON: Integrating Terminology and Assertion

The demands placed on a knowledge representation scheme by a knowledge-based system are generally not all met by any of today’s candidates. Representation languages based on frames or semantic networks have intuitive appeal for forming descriptions but tend to have severely limited assertional power, and are often fraught with ambiguous readings. Those based on first-order logic are less limited assertionally, but are restricted to primitive, unrelated terms. We have attempted to overcome these limitations in a new, hybrid knowledge representation system, called “KRYPTON”. KRYPTON has two representation languages, a frame-based one for forming domain-specific descriptive terms and a logic-based one for making statements about the world. We here summarize the two languages, a functional interface to the system, and an implementation in terms of a taxonomy of frames and its interaction with a first-order theorem prover.