Toward a Knowledge Representation Corpus of Historical Events

Research communities need a large corpus of representative, relevant and interesting problems to evaluate their proposed solutions; unfortunately the KR&R community lacks such a corpus. We therefore propose to construct a large corpus of knowledge representation and reasoning problems, drawing upon readily available historical realworld events for contents, in a highly expressive representation language such as CycL. We discuss some of the properties that the KR&R corpus and the chosen historical events should have to support KR&R research and suggest a specific historical event, the Salem Witch trials, as an appropriate tracer bullet for the construction of this corpus.