Frames are an artificial intelligence data structure used to divide knowledge into substructures by representing "stereotyped situations".
They were proposed by Marvin Minsky in his 1974 article "A Framework for Representing Knowledge". Frames are the primary data structure used in artificial intelligence frame languages; they are stored as ontologies of sets.
Frames are also an extensive part of knowledge representation and reasoning schemes. They were originally derived from semantic networks and are therefore part of structure-based knowledge representations.
According to Russell and Norvig's Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, structural representations assemble "[...]facts about particular objects and event types and arrange the types into a large taxonomic hierarchy analogous to a biological taxonomy".