THE KL-ONE FAMILY

The knowledge representation system KL-ONE has been one of the most influential and imitated knowledge representation systems in the Artificial Intelligence community. Begun at Bolt Beranek and Newman in 1978, KL-ONE pioneered the development of taxonomic representations that can automatically classify and assimilate new concepts based on a criterion of terminological subsumption. This theme generated considerable interest in both the formal community and a large community of potential users. The KL-ONE community has since expanded to include many system at many institutions and in many different countries. This paper introduces the KI-ONE family and discusses some of the main themes explored by KI-ONE and its successors. We give an overview of current research, describe some of the systems that have been developed, and outline some future research directions.