In the same way KIF is meant to facilitate sharing of knowledge across different systems that use different languages, formalisms, platforms, etc.
KIF was created by Michael Genesereth, Richard Fikes and others participating in the DARPA knowledge sharing Effort.
[2] Although the original KIF group intended to submit to a formal standards body, that did not occur.
A later version called Common Logic has since been developed for submission to ISO and has been approved and published.
A practical application of the Knowledge interchange format is an agent communication language in a multi-agent system.