The role of assumptions in knowledge engineering

✍ Scribed by Dieter Fensel; V. Richard Benjamins

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1998
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 231 KB
• Volume: 13
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0884-8173
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1098-111x(199808)13:8<715::aid-int2>3.0.co;2-m

✦ Synopsis

Problem-solving methods are means of describing the inference process of knowledgebased systems. In recent years, a number of these problem-solving methods have been identified that can be reused for building new systems. However, problem-solving methods require specific types of domain knowledge and introduce specific restrictions on the tasks that can be solved by them. These requirements and restrictions are assumptions that play a key role in the reuse of problem-solving methods, in the acquisition of domain knowledge, and in the definition of the problem that can be tackled by knowledge-based systems. In this paper we discuss the different roles assumptions play in the development of knowledge-based systems and provide a survey of assumptions used in diagnostic problem solving. We show how such assumptions introduce targets and bias for goal-driven machine learning and knowledge discovery techniques.