Knowledge Base Maintenance through Knowledge Representation

The problem of maintaining a knowledge base is substantially concerned with keeping track of rules that share common wisdom. A knowledge representation is described in which a collection of rules that are based on common wisdom are represented as a single ‘item’. For items, maintenance hazards, caused by one item being partially hidden within another, still remain. ‘Objects’ are introduced as item building operators so enabling these hidden links to be identified and made explicit. A single operation for objects enables some of these hidden links to be removed thus simplifying maintenance.