Advances in Knowledge Acquisition and Representation

The articles in this special issue represent advances in several areas of knowledge acquisition and knowledge representation. In this article we attempt to place these advances in the context of a fundamental challenge in AI; namely, the automated acquisition of knowledge from data and the representation of this knowledge to support understanding and reasoning. We observe that while this work does indeed advance the field in important areas, the need exists to integrate these components into an end-to-end system and begin to extract general methodologies for this challenge. At the heart of this integration is the need for performance feedback throughout the process to guide the selection of alternative methods, the support for human interaction in the process, and the definition of general metrics and testbeds to evaluate progress.