Combining terminological and rule-based reasoning for abstraction processes

Terminological reasoning systems directly support the abstraction mechanisms generalization and classification. But they do not bother about aggregation and have some problems with reasoning demands such as concrete domains, sequences of finite but unbounded size and derived attributes. The paper demonstrates the relevance of these issues in an analysis of a mechanical engineering application and suggests an integration of a forward-chaining rule system with a terminological logic as a solution to these problems

A Unifying Algorithm for Conditional, Probabilistic Planning

Several recent papers describe algorithms for generating conditional and/or probabilistic plans. In this paper, we synthesize this work, and present a unifying algorithm that incorporates and clarifies the main techniques that have been developed in the previous literature. Our algorithm decouples the search-control strategy for conditional and/or probabilistic planning from the underlying plan-refinement process. A similar decoupling has proven to be very useful in the analysis of classical planning algorithms, and we suspect it can be at least as useful here, where the search-control decisions are even more crucial. We describe an extension of conditional, probabilistic planning, to provide candidates for decision-theoretic assessment, and describe the reasoning about failed branches and side-effects that is needed for this purpose

Knowledge acquisition from text in a complex domain

Complex real world domains can be characterized by a large amount of data, their interactions and that the knowledge must often be related to concrete problems. Therefore, the available descriptions of real world domains do not easily lend themselves to an adequate representation. The knowledge which is relevant for solving a given problem must be extracted from such descriptions with the help of the knowledge acquisition process. Such a process must adequately relate the acquired knowledge to the given problem. An integrated knowledge acquisition framework is developed to relate the acquired knowledge to real world problems. The interactive knowledge acquisition tool COKAM+ is one of three acquisition tools within this integrated framework. It extracts the knowledge from text, provides a documentation of the knowledge and structures it with respect to problems. All these preparations can serve to represent the obtained knowledge adequately

PIM : planning in manufacturing using skeletal plans and features

In order to create a production plan from product model data, a human expert thinks in a special terminology with respect to the given work piece and its production plan: He recognizes certain features and associates fragments of a production plan. By combining these skeletal plans he generates the complete production plan. We present a set of representation formalisms suitable for the modelling of this approach. When an expert\u27s knowledge has been represented using these formalisms, the generation of a production plan can be achieved by a sequence of abstraction, selection and refinement. This is demonstrated in the CAPP-system PIM, which is currently developed as a prototype. The close modelling of the knowledge of the concrete expert (or the accumulated know-how of a concrete factory) facilitate the development of planning systems which are especially tailored to the concrete manufacturing environment and optimally use the expert\u27s knowledge and should also lead to improved acceptance of the system

IDR : a participatory methodology for interdisciplinary design in technology enhanced learning

One of the important themes that emerged from the CAL’07 conference was the failure of technology to bring about the expected disruptive effect to learning and teaching. We identify one of the causes as an inherent weakness in prevalent development methodologies. While the problem of designing technology for learning is irreducibly multi-dimensional, design processes often lack true interdisciplinarity. To address this problem we present IDR, a participatory methodology for interdisciplinary techno-pedagogical design, drawing on the design patterns tradition (Alexander, Silverstein & Ishikawa, 1977) and the design research paradigm (DiSessa & Cobb, 2004). We discuss the iterative development and use of our methodology by a pan-European project team of educational researchers, software developers and teachers. We reflect on our experiences of the participatory nature of pattern design and discuss how, as a distributed team, we developed a set of over 120 design patterns, created using our freely available open source web toolkit. Furthermore, we detail how our methodology is applicable to the wider community through a workshop model, which has been run and iteratively refined at five major international conferences, involving over 200 participants