The CLASSIC Knowledge Representation System or, KL-ONE: The Next Generation.
Ronald J. Brachman, Alexander T. Borgida, Deborah L. McGuinness, Peter F. Patel‐Schneider, Lori Alperin Resnick · 1992
classic is a recently developed knowledge representation (KR) system, based on a view of frames as structured descriptions, with several important inferable relationships, including description classification. While much about classic is novel and important in its own right, it is especially interesting to consider the system in light of its unusual (for Artificial Intelligence) intellectual history: it is the result of over a decade of research and evolution in representation systems that trace their origins back to work on kl-one, arguably one of the most long-lived and influential approaches to KR in the history of AI. We outline some of the novel contributions of classic, but pay special attention to its roots, illustrating the maturation of some of the original features of kl-one, and the decline and fall of others. A number of key ideas are analyzed---including the interpretation of frames as descriptions, the classification inference, and the role of a knowledge representation s...