Knowledge Representation

• When I first took programming classes (in the 80s before object oriented programming), the Professor said that the most important aspect of software development was representing the data.
• Data structures are important, but in AI we are concerned with a more general question of representing knowledge.
• There are lots of ways to represent data and knowledge.
• Standard programming mechanisms like integers, strings and arrarys are good for representing very simple things.
• Facts and Logic are one mechanism.
• Semantic Nets, XML, and Ontologies are others.
• AI systems often do really clever things using clever knowledge representation techniques.