"A knowledge-based system decides how to act by running formal reasoning procedures over a body of explicitly represented knowledge - a knowledge base. The system is not programmed for specific tasks: rather, it is told what it needs to know and is expected to infer the rest.".

"This book is about the logic of such knowledge bases. It describes in detail the relationship between symbolic representations of knowledge and abstract states of knowledge, exploring along the way the foundations of knowledge, knowledge bases, knowledge-based systems, and knowledge representation and reasoning.

Assuming some familiarity with first-order predicate logic, the book offers a new mathematical model of knowledge that is general and expressive yet more workable in practice than previous models."--BOOK JACKET.