Building maintainable knowledge bases with knowledge objects

Knowledge 'objects' are constructors for building chunks of knowledge that enable the hidden links in the knowledge to be identified. A single operation for objects enables these hidden links to be removed from the knowledge thus simplifying maintenance. Analysis of the maintenance links shows that they are of four different types. The density of the maintenance links is reduced by transforming that set into an equivalent set. In this way the knowledge base maintenance problem is analysed and simplified. A side benefit of knowledge items as a formalism is that they contain knowledge constraints that protect the knowledge from unforeseen modification.