Knowledge Interchange Format: the KIF of Death

There has been a good deal of discussion recently about the possibility of standardizing knowledge representation efforts, including the development of an interlingua, or knowledge interchange format (KIF), that would allow developers of declarative knowledge to share their results with other AI researchers. In this article, I examine the practicality of this idea. I present some philosophical arguments against it, describe a straw-man KIF, and suggest specific experiments that would help explore these issues.