The general problem addressed in this book is a large and important one:
how to usefully deal with huge storehouses of complex information about
real-world situations. Every one of the major modes of interacting with
such storehouses - querying, data mining, data analysis - is addressed
by current technologies only in very limited and unsatisfactory ways.
The impact of a solution to this problem would be huge and pervasive, as
the domains of human pursuit to which such storehouses are acutely
relevant is numerous and rapidly growing. Finally, we give a more
detailed treatment of one potential solution with this class, based on
our prior work with the Probabilistic Logic Networks (PLN) formalism. We
show how PLN can be used to carry out realworld reasoning, by means of a
number of practical examples of reasoning regarding human activities
inreal-world situations.