SPECIAL SEC TION THE ROLE OF FRAME-BASED REPRESENTATION IN REASONING

A frame-based representation facility contributes to a knowledge system's ability to reason and can assist the system designer in determining strategies for controlling the system's reasoning. RICHARD IFIKES and TOM KEHLER A fundamental observation arising from work in artifi cial intellige nce (AI) has been that expertise in a task domain requires substantial knowledge about that do main. The effective representation of domain knowl edge is therefore generally considered to be the key stone to the success of AI programs [15] (see Figure 1). Domain knowledge typically has many forms, including descriptive definitions of domain-specific terms (e.g., “power plant, ” “pump, ” “flow, ” “pressure”), descriptions of individual domain objects and their relationships to each other (e.g., “P i is a pump whose pressure is 23