Frame Language - Description

Description

Frame languages primarily focus on the recognition and description of objects and classes, with relations and interactions considered as "secondary".

In general, "frame" in this context means "something that can be/(has to be) fulfilled". In such sense, for example: Object-oriented programming languages are frame languages, but also every grammar is a frame language. In specific contexts, the authors of computer languages use the term "frame" arbitrarily and frequently intuitively, and in a metaphoric sense.

In the field of Artificial Intelligence, a frame is a data structure introduced by Marvin Minsky in the 1970s that can be used for knowledge representation. Minsky frames are intended to help an Artificial Intelligence system recognize specific instances of patterns. Frames usually contain properties called attributes or slots. Slots may contain default values (subject to override by detecting a different value for an attribute), refer to other frames (component relationships) or contain methods for recognizing pattern instances. Frames are thus a machine-usable formalization of concepts or schemata. In contrast, the object-oriented paradigm partitions an information domain into abstraction hierarchies (classes and subclasses) rather than partitioning into component hierarchies, and is used to implement any kind of information processing. Frame Technology is loosely based on Minsky Frames, its purpose being software synthesis rather than pattern analysis.

Like many other knowledge representation systems and languages, frames are an attempt to resemble the way human beings are storing knowledge. It seems like we are storing our knowledge in rather large chunks, and that different chunks are highly interconnected. In frame-based knowledge representations knowledge describing a particular concept is organized as a frame. The frame usually contains a name and a set of slots.

The slots describe the frame with attribute-value pairs or alternatively a triple containing framename, slotname and value in some order. In many frame systems the slots are complex structures that have facets describing the properties of the slot. The value of a slot may be a primitive such as a text string or an integer, or it may be another frame. Most systems allow multiple values for slots and some systems support procedural attachments. These attachments can be used to compute the slot value, or they can be triggers used to make consistency checking or updates of other slots. The triggers can be trigged by updates on slots.