Knowledge base systems : a formal model

Knowledge base systems (KBS's) are gammg popularity among software users and developers. It is, however, not clear what a KBS is and which functions it has to fulfill. In this paper we investigate the notion of what could be called a rule based KBS. We wish to answer two main questions. First, we want to determine what is a KBS intended for, i.e. what should it compute. The second question is, which components are needed in KBS to compute what is intended. Based on logic programming and deductive database theory we elaborate a model of KBS's in which we can answer these questions. Applying the model for examining software tools we observe that it serves as a good guide in evaluating and developing KBS's. 1