Fundamental Database Process: Issues in Object-Oriented Knowledge Representation

The Department of Defense has identified simulation and modeling as technologies critical to national security. The U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratories (USACERL) has recognized the need to provide a more integrated approach to model development and to extend the object-oriented representation to allow more sophisticated uses of knowledge-based tools that support the complex requirements of simulation and modeling. This research investigated fundamental issues in knowledge representation and object-oriented modeling to provide an extension of the object-oriented formalism that would better support knowledge-based programming tools and techniques. Object-oriented and the frame-based approaches are compared. Three aspects of these approaches are examined: the philosophy behind the approach, its methodology, and its implementation. An augmented object-oriented representation is proposed to provide a greater capability to express knowledge about objects, to provide better structure to organize knowledge, and to allow tools to be built to reason about the knowledge stored in the representation.