Teknowledge Corporation

Compagnie Generale De Geophysique

A Carlisle Scott

William J Clancey

Jay S Lark

Lee D Erman

James S Bennett

Jacques Garnier

Jan E Clayton

Philip E London

To help a user program a computer target system to solve problems, the computer system is provided with predefined capabilities and the user is provided with a knowledge system that includes knowledge about applying the capabilities to effectively and efficiently solve the user's problems. The knowledge system provides automatic programming for solving problems within a particular domain, rejects problems that cannot be solved using the available capabilities of the target computer, and explains how and why a certain program was generated or why a program cannot be generated to solve a given problem. The knowledge system preferably collects information about the user's problem, designs a program that exploits the capabilities of the target computer system effectively to address the user's problem, encodes the program into a form suitable for execution on the computer system, conveys the program to the computer system, explains to the user why particular elements of the program are included, and justifies its reasoning to the user. A specific embodiment pertaining to reflection seismology is described for advising a user on how to apply a set of program modules for performing static corrections on seismic data, and for generating a job deck for execution on a general-purpose digital computer.

Intelligent assistant for using and operating computer system

A tool is used for knowledge engineers for building and interpreting a knowledge base having separate portions encoding control knowledge, factual knowledge, and judgmental rules. The tool has an inference engine applying the judgmental rules according to a built-in control procedure defining discrete states or control steps during a consultation with a user. The control knowledge is encoded in an applicative and imperative language defining control actions to be executed during interruption of the built-in control procedure at specified control steps. Since the control knowledge is explicit and results in the modification of data only in a precisely defined fashion, the tool can be used to build knowledge systems that can always explain their conclusions and reasoning, and that are intelligible and modifiable. To provide transparent representation of control knowledge as well as factual knowledge, the knowledge base is preferably organized into distinct frames which include the rules; control blocks separately encoding the control knowledge; and classes which become instantiated, attributes which take on values describing the class instances, class types, legal value hierarchies, and user-defined functions, which all encode factual knowledge. The knowledge engineer may provide control blocks to be executed at the start of the consultation, after the instantiation of specified classes, when a value for a specified attribute is to be determined, after a specified attribute is determined, and upon explicit invocation by another control block. The tool can also implicitly determine subsumed attributes.

Knowledge engineering tool

Growing community of inventors

Palo Alto, CA, United States of America

A Carlisle Scott