The KBMS Project and Beyond

The Knowledge Base Management Systems (KBMS) Project at the University of Toronto (1985-1995) was inspired by a need for advanced knowledge representation applications that require knowledge bases containing hundreds of thousands or even millions of knowledge units. The knowledge representation language Telos provided a framework for the project. The key results included conceptual modeling innovations in the use of semantic abstractions, representations of time and space, and implementation techniques for storage management, query processing, rule management, and concurrency control. In this paper, we review the key ideas introduced in the KBMS project, and connect them to some of the work since the conclusion of the project that is either closely related to or directly inspired by it.