Abstract:
The problem of maintaining a knowledge base is substantially
concerned with keeping track of rules that share common wisdom. A
knowledge representation is described in which a collection of rules that are
based on common wisdom are represented as a single 'item'. For items,
maintenance hazards, caused by one item being partially hidden within
another, still remain. 'Objects' are introduced as item building operators so
enabling these hidden links to be identified and made explicit. A single
operation for objects enables some of these hidden links to be removed thus
simplifying maintenance.
