There exists an impressive quantity of literature dealing with knowledge
Representation that covers highly technical contributions as well as more
philosophical ones or again those that have a more or less explicit "cognitive"
orientation. So, it is not very astonishing to notice that the definition of what
knowledge representation is, is quite vague.
It is not our intention to give a historical survey of that notion nor to proceed
to a critical enumeration of the several topics that are covered by it. Our objective
is, rather, to develop a conceptual framework that should permit us to handle the
major descriptive problems in the conception of knowledge based systems.
In order to be able to put forth in a systematic way our conception of
knowledge representation (KR), we will discuss in the first section some central
problems of knowledge description. In the second section, we will introduce the
conceptual graph theory developed mainly by Sowa (1984) and try to give a more
formal account of KR.
