McCullough Knowledge Explorer
and the MKR language
Dr. Richard H. McCullough
Knowledge Engineer
What is Knowledge Explorer?
McCullough Knowledge Explorer (MKE) is an interactive tool
for organizing knowledge.
It helps the user to record, change and search knowledge, and provides
extensive error checking to ensure the internal consistency of the knowledge.
Interaction with MKE uses the MKR language.
MKR is a very-high-level knowledge representation language with
simple English-like statements, questions and commands,
plus UNIX-shell-like variables, methods and control structures.
Learning the MKR language is facilitated by
a syntax checker
and
a menu interface.
The syntax checker provides a fast check of input knowledge.
The menu interface prompts the user for all necessary
information, and automatically generates the correct input syntax.
What is Knowledge?
Knowledge is an identification of the facts of reality.
Propositional knowledge is knowledge expressed using words and sentences.
The principal internal knowledge structures of MKR/MKE are
entity-characteristic-proposition hierarchies
with space-time-dependent events.
The principal external knowledge structures are RDF files and
MKR text files
(transliterated English, hierarchy outlines, relational databases).
Semantic Web Applications
MKR is a general-purpose knowledge representation language
which is applicable to any domain.
It is ideally suited for Semantic Web applications.
MKE "services" include many consistency checks,
knowledge base queries, knowledge base statistics,
and commands to dynamically modify the instance-class hierarchy.
MKE is implemented using the Unicon and KornShell languages,
providing easy integration with
Unicon procedures, shell scripts, Linux/Windows commands,
web pages and standard databases.
The MKR language is more powerful and more user-friendly
than the OWL language. MKR extensions include
context, questions, commands and n-ary relations.
MKE/MKR provides no direct support for RDF model theory semantics --
it uses "natural language semantics"
of the real world that we live in,
not possible worlds.
MKE provides a user-friendly interface to
the Stanford TAP knowledge base
and the OpenCyc knowledge base.