KBIF: a frame system capable of performing inexact reasoning involving various inexactness factors

KBIF, a frame system capable of representing inexact knowledge of different significance and performing weighted, inexact reasoning and temporal projection is described. Important features of KBIF facilitate inexact reasoning; namely weights are associated with slots in accordance with their relative importance to a frame, confidence factors are associated with slot values to denote their confidences, and bias factors are associated with subframe relation to distinguish different degrees of inheritance favours. Temporal intervals are associated with slots specifying the periods of time during which the values are true. These facilities permit the development of proper inexact reasoning mechanisms for single inheritance, multiple inheritance, anchoring, classification, and temporal projection, satisfying user-specified criteria.