Matters

IKL Guide: "IKL is a logical formalism designed for interchange and archiving of information in a network of logic-based reasoners. IKL is extremely expressive and can represent the same content as a wide variety of formal notations, but it has a simple 'classical' logical semantics and can be processed by conventional first-order logic engines. IKL is a variant of the CLIF dialect of ISO Common Logic [CL], extended with terms which denote propositions and a device for relating names to the character strings which are used to indicate them. Common Logic is a proposed ISO standard for a general-purpose first-order information exchange language, based loosely on KIF [KIF]. The design rationale for CL is explained in [CL]; in summary, it is designed to remove or avoid as many restrictions as possible on what can be said in a first-order language, and to facilitate knowledge interchange across a network. IKL follows in the same tradition. IKL achieves its unique expressiveness from its ability to quantify over the propositions expressed by its own sentences, which in effect allows it to be its own meta-language, so it can bring the full expressive power of logic to the task of talking about propositions as well as simply expressing propositions by sentences. This single device can replace a wide variety of 'alternative' logics, including modal, context, temporal and indexical logics, by various ontologie"