VERY Large Knowledge Bases - Architecture vs Engineering

In the past decade, Al research has created impor tant technologies. The annual investment in , ant return f rom, the several thousand existing systems employ ing Al technology is in the hundreds of mi l l ions of dollars. ... One feature these successful programs have in common is that they work in well-defined domains in which the systems i n fo rmat ion , or knowledge base ( K B ) , is not extremely large. Typical ly , Al systems produce their answers based on no more than several hundred facts concerning the area of their expertise. A l though this is enough for many interesting problems, algor i thmic difficulties have prevented the scaling of Al technology to much larger problems which require rapid access to many thousands or even mi l l ions of facts. Such very large knowledge bases (VLKBs ) are necessary to many applications however, part icular ly those mot ivated by the exponential growth of the in format ion resources, and needs, of our society.