This paper descries D-SCRIPT, a language for representing knowledge in artificial intelligence programs. D-SCRIPT contains a powerful formalism for descriptions, which permits the representation of statements that are problematical for other systems. Particular attention is paid to problems of opaque…

The construction of expert problem-solving systems requires the development of techniques for using modular representations of knowledge without encountering combinatorial explosions in the solution effort. This report describes an approach to dealing with this problem based on making some knowledge…

This article considers factors that limit or exclude civil society involvement in the regulatory process for nanotechnologies by critically examining an attempt to mount a public-interest legal challenge against the UK Health and Safety Executive for failing to properly enforce…

This paper introduces a model of spatial cognition to describe the states of partial knowledge that people have about the spatial structure of a large-scale environment. Spatial knowledge has several different representations, each of which captures one aspect of the…

China’s rapid economic transformation over the last 3 decades has been remarkable both in terms of its speed and scale. As the Economist magazine reported recently, ‘In China each person now produces four times as much as in the early…

Freud's theory of jokes explains how they overcome the mental "censors" that make it hard for us to think "forbidden" thoughts. But his theory did not work so well for humorous nonsense as for other comical subjects. In this essay…

We propose a vision of the structure of knowledge and processes of learning based upon the particularity of experience. Highly specific cognitive structures are constructed through activities in limited domains of experience. For new domains, new cognitive structures develop from…

The computational metaphor which proposes the comparison of processes of mind to realizable or imaginable computer activities suggests a number of educational concerns. This paper discusses some of those concerns including procedural modes of knowledge representation and control knowledge ??owing…

This paper presents an overview of a theory of discourse structure, and discusses a model for assimilating text into a frame-based data structure. The model has been applied to the analysis of news articles. The theory assumes sentences contain links…

In this paper we look at some of the ingredients and processes involved in the understanding of mathematics. We analyze elements of mathematical knowledge, organize them in a coherent way and take note of certain classes of items that share…