Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF)

Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF) is a computer-oriented language for the interchange of knowledge among disparate programs. It has declarative semantics (i.e. the meaning of expressions in the representation can be understood without appeal to an interpreter for manipulating those expressions); it is logically comprehensive (i.e. it provides for the expression of arbitrary sentences in the first-order predicate calculus); it provides for the representation of knowledge about the representation of knowledge; it provides for the representation of nonmonotonic reasoning rules; and it provides for the definition of objects, functions, and relations.

Contents


The KIF Specification

Version 3.0 of the KIF manual, available in Postscript and TeX formats.

The ontologies built into KIF:

Sets
A version of von Neumann/Bernays/Godel set theory
Sequences
primitives for representing sequences (i.e. ordered bags or lists)
Numbers and arithmetic
functions and relations for basic integer and real-number arithmetic
Relations
functions and relations, value and handling undefined functions, variable arity, relationship to sets
"KIF Meta"
for representing metalinguistic knowledge about expressions in the KIF language, such as quoted constraint expressions

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