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The Logic of Knowledge Bases
Hector J. Levesque and Gerhard Lakemeyer
http://mitpress.mit.edu/promotions/books/LEVLHF00

The idea of knowledge bases lies at the heart of symbolic, or
"traditional," artificial intelligence. A knowledge-based system
decides how to act by running formal reasoning procedures over a body
of explicitly represented knowledge--a knowledge base. The system is
not programmed for specific tasks; rather, it is told what it needs to
know and expected to infer the rest.

This book is about the logic of such knowledge bases. It describes in
detail the relationship between symbolic representations of knowledge
and abstract states of knowledge, exploring along the way the
foundations of knowledge, knowledge bases, knowledge-based systems, and
knowledge representation and reasoning. Assuming some familiarity with
first-order predicate logic, the book offers a new mathematical model
of knowledge that is general and expressive yet more workable in
practice than previous models. The book presents a style of semantic
argument and formal analysis that would be cumbersome or completely
impractical with other approaches. It also shows how to treat a
knowledge base as an abstract data type, completely specified in an
abstract way by the knowledge-level operations defined over it.

Hector J. Levesque is Professor and Co-Leader of the Cognitive Robotics
Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto. Gerhard
Lakemeyer is Associate Professor and Head of the Knowledge-Based
Systems Group, Department of Computer Science, Aachen University of
Technology, Germany.

7 x 9, 430 pp., 17 illus., cloth ISBN 0-262-12232-4