KRL is a

knowledge representation Knowledge representation (KR) aims to model information in a structured manner to formally represent it as knowledge in knowledge-based systems whereas knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR, KR&R, or KR²) also aims to understand, reason, and ...

language Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...

, developed by Daniel G. Bobrow and Terry Winograd while at Xerox PARC and

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

, respectively. It is a frame-based language.

KRL was an attempt to produce a language which was nice to read and write for the engineers who had to write programs in it, processed like human memory, so you could have realistic AI programs, had an underlying semantics which was firmly grounded like logic languages, all in one, all in one language. And I think it - again, in hindsight - it just bogged down under the weight of trying to satisfy all those things at once. Oral history interview with Terry Winograd
at
Charles Babbage Institute The IT History Society (ITHS) is an organization that supports the history and scholarship of information technology by encouraging, fostering, and facilitating archival and historical research. Formerly known as the Charles Babbage Foundation, ...
, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

References

Further reading