Languages and The Engineering of Large Knowledge Bases

This position paper expresses the author’s opinion that the development of large Knowledge Bases is subject to the problems traditionally encountered in Software Engineering, and that these problems can be addressed by developing new knowledge representation languages and environments that pay equal attention to a number of issues: expressive power, efficiency of implementation, ease of organization and modification, supporting tools and environments. These points are illustrated by briefly considering the problem of exceptional facts in a knowledge base.