Reference: Gruber, T. The Development of Large, Shared Knowledge-Bases: Collaborative Activities at Stanford. KSL, August, 1990.
Abstract: This is a collection of documents about efforts aimed at sharing knowledge base technology. The efforts started at an informal collaboration among the How Things Work project of the KSL, the DesignWorld project of Mike Genesereth of the Computer Science Department, the NextCut and MKS projects of J.M. Tenenbaum and Mark Cutkosky of the Center for Desgin Research, and the Cyc project of Doug Lenat and R.V. Guha at MCC. At DARPA's request we have contributed to the knowledge representation standards effort, providing straw man proposals and working proposals for standardization of languages and requirements for shared tools and knowledge bases. In the Summer Ontology Project (currently in progress), these research groups and others are collaboratively developing a shared ontology of representation primitives for the area of modelling electromechanical devices. The first paper, "Sharing Knowledge-Based Technology via Knowledge Representation Standards: The Stanford KIF Perspective" by Thomas Gruber, is a straw man proposal for the DARPA/NSF/AFOSR sponsored workshop on KR standards, held in Santa Barbara in March of 1990. The second paper is the report of the working group on "shared knowledge bases" of that workshop, co-chaired by Mark Fox, Thomas Gruber, and Jay Martin Tenenbaum. The third paper is a proposal of activities and funding for a nationwide "bootstrap" effort to get started on building the infrastructure for sharing knowledge bases. It was presented by Gruber and Tenenbaum as a position paper at the DARPA/ESPRIT workshop on KR standards held in Brussels in July of 1990. The fourth paper describes KIF ("Knowledge Interchange Format"), a logic-level interchange language fo rexchanging knowledge bases. KIF was proposed by Michael Genesereth at the Santa Barbara Standards workshop, and a revised version is the working proposal of the interlingua committee of the DARPA standards effort. KIF is currently being used in the Summer Ontology Project.
Full paper available as hqx, ps.