Describing Knowledge Representation Schemes: a Formal Account

The representation and manipulation of knowledge has been drawing a great deal of attention since the early days of computer science, resulting in the introduction of numerous different Knowledge Representation schemes (KRschemes). Given the great variety of such available schemes, it would be desirable to have a uniform way of treating them. In this report, we propose a formal, unifying framework for dealing with KR-schemes. This framework is useful for a formal definition of the reduction of one Knowledge Representation model to another. Based on the notion of reduction, a formal method of comparing KR-schemes in terms of expressive power is proposed and some of its properties are explored.