''Frames'' were a knowledge representation format proposed by Marvin Minsky
in his 1974 paper ''"A Framework for Representing Knowledge"'' [http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/Frames/frames.html].

Briefly, a frame has a name and a set of attribute-value pairs (known as
''slots'').  These slots can be filled by data, methods, or (references to)
other frames, and can have event listeners attached to them (much like variables
in Tcl's [namespace]s).

While the concept was quite popular originally, it seems to have lost out to
[Semantic Networks] and, particularly, [Object Oriented] Programming. Prototype-based
OO (as in Self [http://research.sun.com/self/]) seems to come quite close to
frames.

Cris Fugate developed an implementation of frames for Tcl in 1999 called [Framesets].

Frame systems seem to still have some popularity in the knowledge representation
community, and the [Semantic Web] efforts. For instance, the Protégé [ontology]
editor [http://protege.stanford.edu/] uses a frame system by default (although 
it can also use [OWL]).

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Not to be confused with [Tk]'s [frame] [widget]!

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