Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Artificial Intelligence) (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Artificial Intelligence) | 
 enlarge | Authors: Ronald Brachman, Hector Levesque
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
Category: Book
List Price: $80.95
Buy New: $54.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 294907
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 381
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.2
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 7.8 x 1
ISBN: 1558609326
Dewey Decimal Number: 006.332
EAN: 9781558609327
ASIN: 1558609326
Publication Date: May 19, 2004
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Product Description
Knowledge representation is an area of artificial intelligence concerned with how knowledge can be represented symbolically and manipulated in an automated way by reasoning programs. It is at the very core of a radical idea about how to understand intelligence: instead of trying to understand or build brains from the bottom up, knowledge representation tries to understand or build intelligent behavior from the top down. In particular, the authors ask what an agent would need to know in order to behave intelligently, and what computational mechanisms could allow this knowledge to be made available to the agent as required.
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| Customer Reviews:
 how to reason about knowledge March 13, 2006
4 out of 9 found this review helpful
Brachman and Levesque describe what may be considered the foundations of artificial intelligence. They look at how to represent knowledge. As far more than just a passive collection of facts. The "Reasoning" in the book's title is the important aspect of that representation. You can understand how to apply reasoning in a logical and systematic manner.
Those of you from a computing background may also find similarities between the discussion of object oriented representations and various OO programming languages. You might actually key off these similarities by using the text to guide your KR coding.
 Don't have to be a math buff to understand June 23, 2005
21 out of 21 found this review helpful
I came across this book looking for a text that would explain the context of First Order Logic, why it is used for so many knowledge representation problems, how it is used to solve them, and its limitations. I must say that this is far and away the best book I've found to answer these questions. If you search around a little at the competition, you will find much of the text quickly turning to mathematical proofs and deductions in their explanations. While this is of course necessary and helpful, it doesn't (for me) really give an idea of how and why these methods are used practically. You can tell that these authors spent some time on ensuring consistency and fluency of the writing, which I find so very helpful.
I'm trying to think of something bad to say about it: I wish it were longer! If you read the preface you will see the authors call it an introduction, which is definitely true. Maybe they will team up again for a more in-depth text on some aspect of this subject.
This book is an Eye-Opener! November 24, 2004
24 out of 24 found this review helpful
I love this book- It is a comprehensive introduction into knowledge representation, with enough detail to create your own knowledge representation programs.
Are you a programmer who wonders what it really means when an object *IS* another object, in the form of inheritance found in object-oriented systems? Ever confused by the nuances of multiple inheritance? Ever wonder what XML or OOP or Relational Databases have to do with each other? Ever wonder if all those A.I. programmers in the 70s actually created anything useful? Ever wonder how type systems work? Ever wonder how to store complicated and vague data into a database?
This book doesn't really have answers to these questions (nobody really does, in my opinion) but learning the information in this book is the first step you'll want to take to get closer to some answers...
It basically covers 3 main topics: FOL (traditional logic like you probably learned in college) Frames (sort of the grandaddy of OOP) and Description Logics (a really powerful synthesis of object-thinking with strict logical fundamentals)
This book has a bit of hairy mathematical notation in it, so if your not comfortable talking about things like "an object x that is an element in the domain" some of the chapters will require a bit of effort on your part. The authors are careful, however, to follow every difficult mathematical analysis with some concrete examples that ease the learning process- I often wish examples were more frequent in other theoretical tombs like this. Any computer programmer can process this text with a bit of moderate effort.
I couldn't imagine being a professional programmer and not knowing the information in this book now that I have read it. Although the topics in this book are somewhat obscure today, I think they will receive far greater appreciation in the future- especially among medical software developers. Here's your chance to be ahead of the curve in the field of knowledge representation!
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