An axiom, postulate, or assumption is a statement that is taken to be true, to serve as a premise or starting point for further reasoning and arguments. The word comes from the Ancient Greek word ἀξίωμα (axíōma), meaning 'that which is thought worthy or fit' or 'that which commends itself as evident'.
Automated theorem proving is a subfield of automated reasoning and mathematical logic dealing with proving mathematical theorems by computer programs. Automated reasoning over mathematical proof was a major impetus for the development of computer science.
Cyc is a long-term artificial intelligence project that aims to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base that spans the basic concepts and rules about how the world works. Hoping to capture common sense knowledge, Cyc focuses on implicit knowledge that other AI platforms may take for granted. This is contrasted with facts one might find somewhere on the internet or retrieve via a search engine or Wikipedia. Cyc enables semantic reasoners to perform human-like reasoning and be less "brittle" when confronted with novel situations.
Knowledge representation and reasoning is the field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to representing information about the world in a form that a computer system can use to solve complex tasks such as diagnosing a medical condition or having a dialog in a natural language. Knowledge representation incorporates findings from psychology about how humans solve problems, and represent knowledge in order to design formalisms that will make complex systems easier to design and build. Knowledge representation and reasoning also incorporates findings from logic to automate various kinds of reasoning.
The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0, is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable.
The Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) is an upper ontology intended as a foundation ontology for a variety of computer information processing systems. SUMO defines a hierarchy of classes and related rules and relationships. These are expressed in a version of the language SUO-KIF, a higher-order logic that has a LISP-like syntax, as well as the TPTP family of languages. A mapping from WordNet synsets to SUMO has been defined. Initially, SUMO was focused on meta-level concepts, and thereby would lead naturally to a categorization scheme for encyclopedias. It has now been considerably expanded to include a mid-level ontology and dozens of domain ontologies.
E is a high-performance theorem prover for full first-order logic with equality. It is based on the equational superposition calculus and uses a purely equational paradigm. It has been integrated into other theorem provers and it has been among the best-placed systems in several theorem proving competitions. E is developed by Stephan Schulz, originally in the Automated Reasoning Group at TU Munich, now at Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University Stuttgart.
In the field of artificial intelligence, an inference engine is a component of an intelligent system that applies logical rules to the knowledge base to deduce new information. The first inference engines were components of expert systems. The typical expert system consisted of a knowledge base and an inference engine. The knowledge base stored facts about the world. The inference engine applied logical rules to the knowledge base and deduced new knowledge. This process would iterate as each new fact in the knowledge base could trigger additional rules in the inference engine. Inference engines work primarily in one of two modes either special rule or facts: forward chaining and backward chaining. Forward chaining starts with the known facts and asserts new facts. Backward chaining starts with goals, and works backward to determine what facts must be asserted so that the goals can be achieved.
In computer science, in particular in knowledge representation and reasoning and metalogic, the area of automated reasoning is dedicated to understanding different aspects of reasoning. The study of automated reasoning helps produce computer programs that allow computers to reason completely, or nearly completely, automatically. Although automated reasoning is considered a sub-field of artificial intelligence, it also has connections with theoretical computer science and philosophy.
A semantic wiki is a wiki that has an underlying model of the knowledge described in its pages. Regular, or syntactic, wikis have structured text and untyped hyperlinks. Semantic wikis, on the other hand, provide the ability to capture or identify information about the data within pages, and the relationships between pages, in ways that can be queried or exported like a database through semantic queries.
In computer science and artificial intelligence, ontology languages are formal languages used to construct ontologies. They allow the encoding of knowledge about specific domains and often include reasoning rules that support the processing of that knowledge. Ontology languages are usually declarative languages, are almost always generalizations of frame languages, and are commonly based on either first-order logic or on description logic.
Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF) is a computer language designed to enable systems to share and re-use information from knowledge-based systems. KIF is similar to frame languages such as KL-One and LOOM but unlike such language its primary role is not intended as a framework for the expression or use of knowledge but rather for the interchange of knowledge between systems. The designers of KIF likened it to PostScript. PostScript was not designed primarily as a language to store and manipulate documents but rather as an interchange format for systems and devices to share documents. In the same way KIF is meant to facilitate sharing of knowledge across different systems that use different languages, formalisms, platforms, etc.
Metamath is a formal language and an associated computer program for archiving and verifying mathematical proofs. Several databases of proved theorems have been developed using Metamath covering standard results in logic, set theory, number theory, algebra, topology and analysis, among others.
Frames are an artificial intelligence data structure used to divide knowledge into substructures by representing "stereotyped situations". They were proposed by Marvin Minsky in his 1974 article "A Framework for Representing Knowledge". Frames are the primary data structure used in artificial intelligence frame languages; they are stored as ontologies of sets.
In computer science, the semantic desktop is a collective term for ideas related to changing a computer's user interface and data handling capabilities so that data are more easily shared between different applications or tasks and so that data that once could not be automatically processed by a computer could be. It also encompasses some ideas about being able to share information automatically between different people. This concept is very much related to the Semantic Web, but is distinct insofar as its main concern is the personal use of information.
The concept of the Social Semantic Web subsumes developments in which social interactions on the Web lead to the creation of explicit and semantically rich knowledge representations. The Social Semantic Web can be seen as a Web of collective knowledge systems, which are able to provide useful information based on human contributions and which get better as more people participate. The Social Semantic Web combines technologies, strategies and methodologies from the Semantic Web, social software and the Web 2.0.
Knowledge Engineering Environment (KEE) is a frame-based development tool for expert systems. It was developed and sold by IntelliCorp, and was first released in 1983. It ran on Lisp machines, and was later ported to Lucid Common Lisp with the CLX library, an X Window System (X11) interface for Common Lisp. This version was available on several different UNIX workstations.
NEPOMUK is an open-source software specification that is concerned with the development of a social semantic desktop that enriches and interconnects data from different desktop applications using semantic metadata stored as RDF. Between 2006 and 2008 it was funded by a European Union research project of the same name that grouped together industrial and academic actors to develop various Semantic Desktop technologies.
Natural-language programming (NLP) is an ontology-assisted way of programming in terms of natural-language sentences, e.g. English. A structured document with Content, sections and subsections for explanations of sentences forms a NLP document, which is actually a computer program. Natural language programming is not to be mixed up with natural language interfacing or voice control where a program is first written and then communicated with through natural language using an interface added on. In NLP the functionality of a program is organised only for the definition of the meaning of sentences. For instance, NLP can be used to represent all the knowledge of an autonomous robot. Having done so, its tasks can be scripted by its users so that the robot can execute them autonomously while keeping to prescribed rules of behaviour as determined by the robot's user. Such robots are called transparent robots as their reasoning is transparent to users and this develops trust in robots. Natural language use and natural-language user interfaces include Inform 7, a natural programming language for making interactive fiction, Shakespeare, an esoteric natural programming language in the style of the plays of William Shakespeare, and Wolfram Alpha, a computational knowledge engine, using natural-language input. Some methods for program synthesis are based on natural-language programming.
In information technology a reasoning system is a software system that generates conclusions from available knowledge using logical techniques such as deduction and induction. Reasoning systems play an important role in the implementation of artificial intelligence and knowledge-based systems.
