Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Artificial Intelligence)

A concise and lucid exposition of the major topics in knowledge representation, from two of the leading authorities in the field. -Stuart Russell, UC Berkeley The information is valuable not only for AI researchers, but also for people working on logical databases, XML, and the semantic web. Read this book, and avoid reinventing the wheel! -Henry Kautz, University of Washington Brachman and Levesque have been at the forefront of KR&R for two decades. This is the definitive book on KR&R, and it is long overdue. -Yoav Shoham, Stanford University Knowledge representation is at the very core of a radical idea for understanding intelligence. Instead of trying to understand or build brains from the bottom up, its goal is to understand and build intelligent behavior from the top down, putting the focus on what an agent needs to know in order to behave intelligently, how this knowledge can be represented symbolically, and how automated reasoning procedures can make this knowledge available as needed. This landmark text takes the central concepts of knowledge representation developed over the last 50 years and illustrates them in a lucid and compelling way. Each of the various styles of representation is presented in a simple and intuitive form, and the basics of reasoning with that representation are explained in detail. This approach gives readers a solid foundation for understanding the more advanced work found in the research literature. The presentation is clear enough to be accessible to a broad audience, including researchers and practitioners in database management, information retrieval, and object-oriented systems as well as artificial intelligence. This book provides the foundation in knowledge representation and reasoning that every AI practitioner needs.Hector Levesque is the author of 'Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Artificial Intelligence)', published 2004 under ISBN 9781558609327 and ISBN 1558609326.