Knowledge representation for reasoning about devices

A novel knowledge-representation methodology that imposes syntactic structure and semantic discipline on the knowledge base is presented. The representation is based on the semantic network formalism and extends its organization principles to the semantics of the stored knowledge. Knowledge is classified according to subject and is organized into an inheritance hierarchy. Domain and reasoning knowledge are separated. Stored knowledge becomes reusable and can be shared among applications. The presented methodology supports reasoning through classification, specialization, and instantiation