Knowledge Representation Representation Formalisms in Machine Learning

We begin with what seems a paradox. The world of experience of any normal man is composed of a tremendous array of discriminably different objects, events, people, impressions...But were we to utilize fully our capacity for registering the differences in things and to respond to each event encountered as unique, we would soon be overwhelmed by the complexity of our environment... The resolution of this seeming paradox ... is achieved by man’s capacity to categorize. To categorise is to render discriminably different things equivalent, to group objects and events and people around us into classes... The process of categorizing involves ... an act of invention... If we have learned the class “house” as a concept, new exemplars can be readily recognised. The category becomes a tool for further use. The learning and utilization of categories represents one of the most elementary and general forms of cognition by which man adjusts to his environment.