On Knowledge Representation and Meaning

An understanding of knowledge representation entails an understanding of meaning. For how could one represent some unit of knowledge without knowing what it meant? Yes, a particular unit of information represents a unit of knowledge by virtue of the fact that it has meaning.

For sometime now I have been thinking about what it would take to develop a normal form for knowledge. I needed to have a knowledge representation vehicle which would be able to capture logical claims in an unambiguous way. This knowledge representation vehicle would include:

• a Universe of Discourse containing all identities talked about
• a set of functions, called associators (included in the universe of discourse) which would define associations between objects in the universe of discourse.

Based on this knowledge representation vehicle a language would be designed allowing arbitrarily complex claims to be made about objects in the universe of discourse. The language would be such that it would distinguish between two things I consider especially important in this regard:

• for all expressions in the language the truth-value would be defined
• for all expressions in the language the meaning (or the significance) would be defined.

Just like the knowledge representation vehicle represents knowledge as a set of logical claims, the significance, or the meaning, of an expression in this language would also be a claim.

Here is the paper I wrote on this subject in PDF. I'm developing a discourse management system based in the foundation presented in this paper.