Diagnosis systems in medicine with reusable knowledge components

Constructing knowledge systems is viewed as a modeling activity for developing structured knowledge and reasoning models. To ensure well-formed models, the use of some knowledge engineering methodology is crucial. Additionally, reusing models can significantly reduce the time and costs of building a new application. Reusing knowledge components across different applications and domains can help acquire expert knowledge and accurately describe the reasoning process. In fact, current knowledge engineering research has taken major initiatives in the development of knowledge systems by reusing generic components, such as ontologies or problem-solving methods. The article shows how we developed a diagnosis-aid system by reusing and adapting genetic knowledge components for diagnosing eye emergencies.     

Reasoning in inconsistent knowledge bases

Databases and knowledge bases could be inconsistent in many ways. For example, during the construction of an expert system, we may consult many different experts. Each expert may provide us with a group of rules and facts which are self-consistent. However, when we coalesce the facts and rules provided by these different experts, inconsistency may arise. Alternatively, knowledge bases may be inconsistent due to the presence of some erroneous information. Thus, a framework for reasoning about knowledge bases that contain inconsistent information is necessary. However, existing frameworks for reasoning with inconsistency do not support reasoning by cases and reasoning with the law of excluded middle (“everything is either true or false”). In this paper, we show how reasoning with cases, and reasoning with the law of excluded middle may be captured. We develop a declarative and operational semantics for knowledge bases that are possibly inconsistent. We compare and contrast our work with work on explicit and non-monotonic modes of negation in logic programs and suggest under what circumstances one framework may be preferred over another     

Distributed reasoning with ontologies and rules in order-sorted logic programming

Integrating ontologies and rules on the Semantic Web enables software agents to interoperate between them; however, this leads to two problems. First, reasoning services in SWRL (a combination of OWL and RuleML) are not decidable. Second, no studies have focused on distributed reasoning services for integrating ontologies and rules in multiple knowledge bases. In order to address these problems, we consider distributed reasoning services for ontologies and rules with decidable and effective computation. In this paper, we describe multiple order-sorted logic programming that transfers rigid properties from knowledge bases. Our order-sorted logic contains types (rigid sorts), non-rigid sorts, and unary predicates that distinctly express essential sorts, non-essential sorts, and non-sortal properties. We formalize the order-sorted Horn-clause calculus for such properties in a single knowledge base. This calculus is extended by embedding rigid-property derivation for multiple knowledge bases, each of which can transfer rigid-property information from other knowledge bases. In order to enable the reasoning to be effective and decidable, we design a query-answering system that combines order-sorted linear resolution and rigid-property resolution as top-down algorithms.     

Intelligent computer-aided-design systems: a synergical approach of artificial intelligénce and engineering

A synergism has begun to surface from the artificial intelligence (AI) and engineering communities: an effort to apply AI techniques to engineering problem-solving activities, and to study problems arisen from various engineering fields as a way to develop AI theories and methodologies. This paper first discusses the needs of such a synergical approach and identifies in a broad perspective some AI techniques currently being applied to engineering. It then describes a system, called KREATOR, which applies qualitative reasoning, a subfield of AI, to computer-aided design (CAD). The key observation is that an engineer designer's qualitative knowledge can offer a good basis for the reasoning of device behaviors. Such knowledge, however, is not captured by conventional CAD systems for lack of good representations. KREATOR is a knowledge capturing scheme that allows the designers to record their qualitative knowledge of how mechanical devices behave, KREATOR then automatically generates qualitative simulations.     

Spatial reasoning in a fuzzy region connection calculus

Although the region connection calculus (RCC) offers an appealing framework for modelling topological relations, its application in real-world scenarios is hampered when spatial phenomena are affected by vagueness. To cope with this, we present a generalization of the RCC based on fuzzy set theory, and discuss how reasoning tasks such as satisfiability and entailment checking can be cast into linear programming problems. We furthermore reveal that reasoning in our fuzzy RCC is NP-complete, thus preserving the computational complexity of reasoning in the RCC, and we identify an important tractable subfragment. Moreover, we show how reasoning tasks in our fuzzy RCC can also be reduced to reasoning tasks in the original RCC. While this link with the RCC could be exploited in practical reasoning algorithms, we mainly focus on the theoretical consequences. In particular, using this link we establish a close relationship with the Egg-Yolk calculus, and we demonstrate that satisfiable knowledge bases can be realized by fuzzy regions in any dimension.     

Abductive Knowledge Base Updates for Contextual Reasoning

We show in this paper how procedures that update knowledge bases can naturally be adapted to a number of problems related to contextual reasoning. The fact that the update procedures are abductive in nature is favourably exploited to tackle problems related to human-computer dialogue systems. We consider as examples aspects of pronoun resolution,goal formulation , and the problem of restoring the consistency of a knowledge base after some knowledge update is carried out. We state these problems in terms of the update problem and abductive reasoning and show how procedures that update knowledge bases yield some interesting results. We also explain how these procedures can naturally be used to model various forms of hypothetical reasoning such as hypothesizing inconsistencies and performing some look ahead form of reasoning.We do not claim thaT the problems presented here are solved entirely within the update framework. However, we believe that the flexibility of the representation and of the problem-solving approach suggest that the problems could be solved by adding more details about each problem. What is most interesting in our understanding is that all the aforementioned problems are expressed and tackled within the same framework.     

Probabilistic knowledge representation using the principle of maximum entropy and Gröbner basis theory

An often used methodology for reasoning with probabilistic conditional knowledge bases is provided by the principle of maximum entropy (so-called MaxEnt principle) that realises an idea of least amount of assumed information and thus of being as unbiased as possible. In this paper we exploit the fact that MaxEnt distributions can be computed by solving nonlinear equation systems that reflect the conditional logical structure of these distributions. We apply the theory of Gröbner bases that is well known from computational algebra to the polynomial system which is associated with a MaxEnt distribution, in order to obtain results for reasoning with maximum entropy. We develop a three-phase compilation scheme extracting from a knowledge base consisting of probabilistic conditionals the information which is crucial for MaxEnt reasoning and transforming it to a Gröbner basis. Based on this transformation, a necessary condition for knowledge bases to be consistent is derived. Furthermore, approaches to answering MaxEnt queries are presented by demonstrating how inferring the MaxEnt probability of a single conditional from a given knowledge base is possible. Finally, we discuss computational methods to establish general MaxEnt inference rules.     

CONSTRAINT MECHANISMS IN AUTOMATED KNOWLEDGE GENERATION

Abstract

In the past decade, the use of control and diagnostic reasoning systems in different areas of government, industry, and university operations has increased. A great number of these systems find their basis in engineering, specifically in process control. The majority of the time devoted to the development of these systems is spent in the areas of Knowledge Engineering (KE) and Knowledge Acquisition (KA). Extensive research for the development of systems that perform the KE task is under way. This article presents an approach toward automatic knowledge acquisition. The objective of this research was to construct a complete knowledge base for a diagnostic and control reasoning system from information that resides in Computer Aided Design (CAD) databases. This work will decrease the amount of time spent in the manual generation of knowledge bases for diagnostic reasoning systems, ft will also enable the creation of more reliable knowledge bases since less hand coding is required.     

Using aspect orientation in legacy environments for reverse engineering using dynamic analysis—An industrial experience report

This paper reports on the challenges of using aspect-oriented programming (AOP) to aid in re-engineering a legacy C application. More specifically, we describe how AOP helps in the important reverse engineering step which typically precedes a re-engineering effort. We first present a comparison of the available AOP tools for legacy C code bases, and then argue on our choice of Aspicere, our own AOP implementation for C. Then, we report on Aspicere’s application in reverse engineering a legacy industrial software system and we show how we apply a dynamic analysis to regain insight into the system. AOP is used for instrumenting the system and for gathering the data. This approach works and is conceptually very clean, but comes with a major quid pro quo: integration of AOP tools with the build system proves an important issue. This leads to the question of how to reconcile the notion of modular reasoning within traditional build systems with a programming paradigm which breaks this notion.     

Redundancy detection in semistructured case bases

With the dramatic proliferation of case-based reasoning systems in commercial applications, many case bases are now becoming legacy systems. They represent a significant portion of an organization's assets, but they are large and difficult to maintain. One of the contributing factors is that these case bases are often large and yet unstructured or semistructured; they are represented in natural language text. Adding to the complexity is the fact that the case bases are often authored and updated by different people from a variety of knowledge sources, making it highly likely for a case base to contain redundant and inconsistent knowledge. We present methods and a system for maintaining large and semistructured case bases. We focus on a difficult problem in case base maintenance: redundancy detection. This problem is particularly pervasive when one deals with a semistructured case base. We discuss an information retrieval-based algorithm and an implemented system for solving this problem. As the ability to contain the knowledge acquisition problem is of paramount importance, our method allows one to express relevant domain expertise for detecting redundancy naturally and effortlessly. Empirical evaluations of the system demonstrate the effectiveness of the methods in several large domains     

Knowledge engineering issues in developing a case-based reasoning application

Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) has emerged from research in cognitive psychology as a model of human memory and remembering. It has been embraced by researchers of AI applications as a methodology that avoids some of the knowledge acquisition and reasoning problems that occur with other methods for developing knowledge-based systems. In this paper we propose that, in developing knowledge based systems, knowledge engineering addresses two tasks. There is a problem analysis task that produces the problem representation and there is the task of developing the inference mechanism. CBR has an impact on the second of these tasks but helps less with the first. We argue that in some domains this problem analysis process can be significant and propose an iterative methodology for addressing it. To evaluate this, we describe the application of case-based reasoning to the problem of aircraft conflict resolution in a system called ISAC. We describe the application of this iterative methodology and assess the knowledge engineering impact of CBR.     

Hybrid approach using case-based reasoning and rule-based reasoning for domain independent clinical decision support in ICU

This paper presents a hybrid approach of case-based reasoning and rule-based reasoning, as an alternative to the purely rule-based method, to build a clinical decision support system for ICU. This enables the system to tackle problems like high complexity, low experienced new staff and changing medical conditions. The purely rule-based method has its limitations since it requires explicit knowledge of the details of each domain of ICU, such as cardiac domain hence takes years to build knowledge base. Case-based reasoning uses knowledge in the form of specific cases to solve a new problem, and the solution is based on the similarities between the new problem and the available cases. This paper presents a case-based reasoning and rule-based reasoning based model which can provide clinical decision support for all domains of ICU unlike rule-based inference models which are highly domain knowledge specific. Experiments with real ICU data as well as simulated data clearly demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method.     

A knowledge encapsulation approach to ontology modularization

The development of monolithic ontologies for complex domains may face various challenges in reasoning and implementation. The notion of modularity can be employed for developing more efficient ontologies, especially in distributed environments. In this paper, we introduce a framework for developing ontologies in a modular manner. We describe the interface-based modular ontology formalism, (IBF), which theoretically supports the framework. The main feature of the framework is its support for knowledge encapsulation, i.e., it allows ontologies to define their main content using well-defined interfaces, such that their knowledge bases can only be accessed by other ontologies through these interfaces. An important implication of the proposed framework is that ontology modules can be developed completely independent of each other’s signature and languages. Such modules are free to only utilize the required knowledge segments of the others. We also investigate the issues of inconsistency in the proposed modular ontology framework. We provide solutions for isolating inconsistent ontology modules from the other parts of a modular ontology and also resolve inconsistencies which may be arisen by integrating consistent knowledge bases.     

面向开放文本的逻辑推理知识抽取与事件影响推理探索

开放文本中蕴含着大量的逻辑性知识,以刻画事物之间逻辑传导关系的逻辑类知识库是推动知识推理发展的重要基础,研发大规模逻辑推理知识库有助于支持由实体或事件等传导驱动的决策任务。该文围绕逻辑推理知识库,论述了知识库的概念、类别和基本构成,提出了一种面向大规模开放文本的实体描述、事件因果逻辑知识快速抽取方法;面向金融领域,探索了一套基于逻辑推理知识库的可解释性路径推理方法和金融实体影响生成系统。算法模型和系统均取得了不错的效果。     

Building knowledge base management systems

Advanced applications in fields such as CAD, software engineering, real-time process control, corporate repositories and digital libraries require the construction, efficient access and management of large, shared knowledge bases. Such knowledge bases cannot be built using existing tools such as expert system shells, because these do not scale up, nor can they be built in terms of existing database technology, because such technology does not support the rich representational structure and inference mechanisms required for knowledge-based systems. This paper proposes a generic architecture for a knowledge base management system intended for such applications. The architecture assumes an object-oriented knowledge representation language with an assertional sublanguage used to express constraints and rules. It also provides for general-purpose deductive inference and special-purpose temporal reasoning. Results reported in the paper address several knowledge base management issues. For storage management, a new method is proposed for generating a logical schema for a given knowledge base. Query processing algorithms are offered for semantic and physical query optimization, along with an enhanced cost model for query cost estimation. On concurrency control, the paper describes a novel concurrency control policy which takes advantage of knowledge base structure and is shown to outperform two-phase locking for highly structured knowledge bases and update-intensive transactions. Finally, algorithms for compilation and efficient processing of constraints and rules during knowledge base operations are described. The paper describes original results, including novel data structures and algorithms, as well as preliminary performance evaluation data. Based on these results, we conclude that knowledge base management systems which can accommodate large knowledge bases are feasible. Edited by Gunter Schlageter and H.-J. Schek. Received May 19, 1994 / Revised May 26, 1995 / Accepted September 18, 1995     

Mining the Semantic Web

In the Semantic Web vision of the World Wide Web, content will not only be accessible to humans but will also be available in machine interpretable form as ontological knowledge bases. Ontological knowledge bases enable formal querying and reasoning and, consequently, a main research focus has been the investigation of how deductive reasoning can be utilized in ontological representations to enable more advanced applications. However, purely logic methods have not yet proven to be very effective for several reasons: First, there still is the unsolved problem of scalability of reasoning to Web scale. Second, logical reasoning has problems with uncertain information, which is abundant on Semantic Web data due to its distributed and heterogeneous nature. Third, the construction of ontological knowledge bases suitable for advanced reasoning techniques is complex, which ultimately results in a lack of such expressive real-world data sets with large amounts of instance data. From another perspective, the more expressive structured representations open up new opportunities for data mining, knowledge extraction and machine learning techniques. If moving towards the idea that part of the knowledge already lies in the data, inductive methods appear promising, in particular since inductive methods can inherently handle noisy, inconsistent, uncertain and missing data. While there has been broad coverage of inducing concept structures from less structured sources (text, Web pages), like in ontology learning, given the problems mentioned above, we focus on new methods for dealing with Semantic Web knowledge bases, relying on statistical inference on their standard representations. We argue that machine learning research has to offer a wide variety of methods applicable to different expressivity levels of Semantic Web knowledge bases: ranging from weakly expressive but widely available knowledge bases in RDF to highly expressive first-order knowledge bases, this paper surveys statistical approaches to mining the Semantic Web. We specifically cover similarity and distance-based methods, kernel machines, multivariate prediction models, relational graphical models and first-order probabilistic learning approaches and discuss their applicability to Semantic Web representations. Finally we present selected experiments which were conducted on Semantic Web mining tasks for some of the algorithms presented before. This is intended to show the breadth and general potential of this exiting new research and application area for data mining.     

An adaptive Student Centered Curriculum for an intelligent training system

An intelligent tutoring system customizes its presentation of knowledge to the individual needs of each student based on a model of the student. Student models are more complex than other user models because the student is likely to have misconceptions. We have addressed several difficult issues in reasoning about a student's knowledge and skills within a real-time simulation-based training system. Our conceptual framework enables important aspects of the tutor's reasoning to be based upon simple, comprehensible representations that are the basis for a Student Centered Curriculum. We have built a system for teaching cardiac resuscitation techniques in which the decisions abouthow to teach are separated from the decisions aboutwhat to teach. The training context (i.e., choice of topics) is changed based on a tight interaction between student modeling techniques and simulation management. Although complex student models are still required to support detailed reasoning about how to teach, we argue that the decision about what to teach can be adequately supported by qualitatively simpler techniques, such as overlay models. This system was evaluated in formative studies involving medical school faculty and students. Construction of the student model involves monitoring student actions during a simulation and evaluating these actions in comparison with an expert model encoded as a multi-agent plan. The plan recognition techniques used in this system are novel and allow the expert knowledge to be expressed in a form that is natural for domain experts.     

设计型专家系统在机械工程中的应用研究

专家系统是人工智能技术的一个重要分支，它是特定领域的一套计算机程序，具有类似专家工作时利用知识进行推理来解决问题的能力。它一般用以求解那些需要人类专家才能求解的高难度问题或不良结构的问题，为人类保存、使用、传播和评价知识提供了一条有效的捷径。文中主要介绍设计型专家系统在机械工程中的应用以及其基本结构、知识表示方法、推理方式及构建策略，然后介绍了它在齿轮传动设计中的应用。设计型专家系统的产生和发展必然会促进设计自动化技术在机械工程中的应用。     

基于描述逻辑的模糊ER模型

分析了描述逻辑ALNUI与ER模型的关系,特别是如何将ER模型转化为ALNUI的知识库,从而利用ALNUI的推理机制对ER模型进行自动推理的有效性,在此基础上,进一步研究了基于描述逻辑的模糊ER模型.针对模糊ER模型的特点和需求,在描述逻辑ALNUI的基础上,对描述逻辑ALNUI进行了模糊化推广,提出了一种新的描述逻辑,即模糊描述逻辑FALNUI.研究了基于FALNUI的模糊ER模型,即研究了如何将模糊ER模型转化为FALNUI的知识库,并利用FALNUI的推理机制研究了模糊ER模型的可满足性、冗余性和包含关系等自动推理问题,证明了这些推理问题的正确性.     

Verification and correctness issues for nonmonotonic knowledge bases

Anomalies such as redundant, contradictory, or deficient knowledge in a knowledge base indicate possible errors. Various methods for detecting such anomalies have been introduced, analyzed, and applied in the past years, but they usually deal with rule-based systems. So far, little attention has been paid to the verification and validation of more complex representations, such as nonmonotonic knowledge bases, although there are good reasons to expect that these technologies will be increasingly used in practical applications. This article does a step towards the verification of knowledge bases which include defaults by providing a theoretical foundation of correctness concepts and a classification of possible anomalies. It also points out how existing verification methods may be applied to detect some anomalies in nonmonotonic knowledge bases, and discusses methods of avoiding potential inconsistencies (in the context of default reasoning inconsistency means nonexistence of extensions). © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.