Knowledge Base Maintenance through Knowledge Representation

The problem of maintaining a knowledge base is substantially concerned with keeping track of rules that share common wisdom. A knowledge representation is described in which a collection of rules that are based on common wisdom are represented as a single `item'. For items, maintenance hazards, caused by one item being partially hidden within another, still remain. `Objects' are introduced as item building operators so enabling these hidden links to be identified and made explicit. A single operation for objects enables some of these hidden links to be removed thus simplifying maintenance