Abstract

Although knowledge representation is one of the central and in some ways most familiar concepts in AI, the most fundamental question about it---What is it?---has rarely been answered directly. Numerous papers have lobbied for one or another variety of representation, other papers have argued for various properties a representation should have, while still others have focused on properties that are important to the notion of representation in general. In this paper we go back to basics to address the question directly. We believe that the answer can best be understood in terms of five important and distinctly different roles that a representation plays, each of which places different and at times conflicting demands on the properties a representation should have. We argue that keeping in mind all five of these roles provides a usefully broad perspective that sheds light on some longstanding disputes and can invigorate both research and practice in the field. 1 This report describes res...

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