KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION FROM NEWTON TO MINSKY AND BEYOND

Abstract

An attempt is made to see recent developments in knowledge representation, clustered around Minsky 's theory of frames, and the more classical modeling of natural processes, originating in Newton's mechanics, in a unified perspective. Defining knowledge as homomorphic representation, we view classical models as capable of providing behavioral knowledge but lacking in capability to represent important structural knowledge and meta-knowledge. He discuss a framework, inspired by system theoretic concepts, for combining structural and behavioral representation in a form suitable for goal-directed model construction. We conclude by drawing several implications of this approach for system design, artificial intelligence, modeling, and simulation.