Review of Conceptual Structures: Information Processing in Mind and Machine

摘要

Anyone who plans to get involved with issues of knowledge representation should have at least a passing acquaintance with Sowa's conceptual graphs. However, one is more likely to come away with a useful outlook of this work from Sowa's paper of 1976 than from his book. Of course, there is much more to knowledge representation than Sowa's view of it. In this respect there is no textbook which will serve the needs of the curious student. However, the Readings in Knowledge Representation volume prepared by Brachman and Levesque will provide one with most of the current perspectives on the subject. Cognitive science is another area which is not very well served by any textbook. Norman have prepared an excellent chapter on 'Representation in Memory' for the second edition of the Steven's Handbook of Experimental Psychology; but this volume is not yet published (and one hopes it will not suffer the same fate as Sowa's book). In the area of expert systems, there seems to be no end of books which provoke no end of opinions. However, none of these books have been any more successful than Sowa's in their attempts to provide a unified framework for the subject. One can only hope that eventually such a book will be written.