KIF: What's our goal?

[Adam Pease]

Chris,
   You're right about the "original" SUO-KIF document that I put 
together.  We need a language in which to code the SUO.  I hoped we could 
quickly settle on a simple language and get on with the "real" task of 
creating terms and axioms.  It would certainly be advantageous if the SUO 
were itself based on a language that is a standard.  My goal was to have a 
language for human communication that could also be used for inference.

Adam

At 12:24 PM 7/4/2001 -0400, Christopher A. Welty wrote:

>I think we should try to capture a list (hopefully not too long) of 
>reasons why we think our-KIF is important.  We all know the original KIF 
>started out as an *interchange* format for (and this is key) translating 
>theories in one *KR language* to another. Regardless of what it became, it 
>really was not intended to interchange "theories". For that reason, 
>expressiveness was considered important, I believe, in order that 
>interchange be as "semantically loss-less" as possible - or at least that 
>any loss would not be the fault of the interchange language itself.
>
>The original KIF was also *not* supposed to be for people to read or 
>write.  You were supposed to write theories in your favorite KR language 
>and then just run some translator if you needed KIF for some reason.
>
>The original KIF was also *not* supposed to have any inference engines for 
>it.  The goal was interchange, not inference.
>
>Probably some other things could be said here, but my point is not to 
>engage in discussing the history of KIF.
>
>I got the impression that this, originally called "SUO-KIF", group was 
>discussing a language, based on KIF, that *would* be for people - to write 
>parts of the SUO in.  There *would* be inference engines for it.  It would 
>*not*, in fact, be an interchange language the way the previous KIF was.
>
>I'm also getting the impression that different people here may have 
>completely different goals, and I think getting those out in the open may 
>help resolve some of these disputes.
>
>-ChrisW
>
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>Christopher A. Welty        http://www.cs.vassar.edu/faculty/welty/
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Adam Pease
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