Introduction

Abstract

 The general problem addressed in this book is how to effectively carry out reasoning, knowledge discovery and querying based on huge amounts of complex information about real-world situations. Specifically we conceive “real-world reasoning” here mainly as “massively scalable reasoning involving uncertainty, space, time, cause and context.” Of course there are other important aspects to reasoning about the real world we live in, e.g. the hierarchical structure of much of the human world, and we will briefly touch on some of these here as well. But for the purposes of this book, when we mention “real-world reasoning” or RWR, we’re mostly talking about uncertainty, spacetime, cause, context and scalability.