Task structures as a basis for modeling knowledge-based systems

✍ Scribed by Jonathan Lee

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 171 KB
• Volume: 12
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0884-8173
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1098-111x(199703)12:3<167::aid-int1>3.0.co;2-n

✦ Synopsis

Recently, there has been an increasing interest in improving the reliability and quality of AI systems. As a result, a number of approaches to knowledge-based systems modeling have been proposed. However, these approaches are limited in formally verifying the intended functionality and behavior of a knowledge-based system. In this article, we proposed a formal treatment to task structures to formally specify and verify knowledgebased systems modeled using these structures. The specification of a knowledge-based system modeled using task structures has two components: a model specification that describes static properties of the system, and a process specification that characterizes dynamic properties of the system. The static properties of a system are described by two models: a model about domain objects (domain model), and a model about the problemsolving states (state model). The dynamic properties of the system are characterized by (1) using the notion of state transition to explicitly describe what the functionality of a task is, and (2) specifying the sequence of tasks and interactions between tasks (i.e., behavior of a system) using task state expressions (TSE). The task structure extended with the proposed formalism not only provides a basis for detailed functional decomposition with procedure abstraction embedded in, but also facilitates the verification of the intended functionality and behavior of a knowledge-based system.