Acquiring and using large scale knowledge

Formalized representations of knowledge can offer greater flexibility and broader applicability to problem solving programs, by reducing the need for specialized programming. However, this promise can only be fully realized if all of the knowledge required for some task is available in suitable form. The recent increase in popularity of logicbased representations, operating over web-based logical symbols (the Semantic Web [ref]) offers some hope that the available knowledge might become available, but so far, the results of this representational activity have been mostly indicative, rather than broad demonstrations of the application of automated reasoning to answer real, practical needs.