The growing demand for systems of ever-increasing complexity and precision has stimulated the need for higher level concepts, tools, and techniques in every area of Computer Science. Some of these areas, in particular Artificial Intelligence, Databases, and Programming Lan guages, are attempting to meet this demand by defining a new, more abstract level of system description. We call this new level conceptual in recognition of its basic conceptual nature. In Artificial Intelligence, the problem of designing an expert system is seen primarily as a problem of building a knowledge base that repre sents knowledge about an enterprise. Consequently, Knowledge Repre sentation is viewed as a central issue in Artificial Intelligence research. Database design methodologies developed during the last five years are almost unanimous in offering semantic data models in terms of which the designer directly and naturally models an enterprise before proceed ing to a detailed logical and physical database design. In Programming Languages, different forms of abstraction which allow implementation independent specifications of data, functions, and control have been a major research theme for a decade. To emphasize the common goals of these three research efforts, we call this new activity conceptual modelling."

This volume contains the elaborated and harmonized versions of seven lectures given at the first Advanced Course in Artificial Intelligence, held in Vignieu, France, in July 1985. Most of them were written in tutorial form; the book thus provides an extremely valuable guide to the fundamental aspects of AI. In the first part, Delgrande and Mylopoulos discuss the concept of knowledge and its representation. The second part is devoted to the processing of knowledge. The contribution by Huet shows that both computation and inference or deduction are just different aspects of the same phenomenon. The chapter written by Stickel gives a thorough and knowledgeable introduction to the most important aspects of deduction by some form of resolution. The kind of reasoning that is involved in inductive inference problem solving (or programming) from examples, and in learning, is covered by Biermann. The tutorial by Bibel covers the more important forms of knowledge processing that might play a significant role in common sense reasoning. The third part of the book focuses on logic programming and functional programming. Jorrand presents the language FP2, where term rewriting forms the basis for the semantics of both functional and parallel programming. In the last chapter, Shapiro gives an overview of the current state of concurrent PROLOG.