Explicit and persistent knowledge in engineering drawing analysis

technical reportDomain knowledge permeates all aspects of the engineering drawing analysis process, including understanding the physical processes operating on the medium (i.e., paper), the image analysis techniques, and the interpretation semantics of the structural layout and contents of the drawing. Additionally, an understanding of the broader reverse engineering context, within which the drawing analysis takes place, should be exploited. Thus as part of a wider project on the reverse engineering of legacy systems, we have developed an agent-based engineering analysis system called NDAS (nonDeterministic Agent System). In this paper, we discuss the nature of such a system and how knowledge can be made explicit (both for agents and humans) and how performance models can be de?ned, calibrated, monitored, and improved over time through the use of persistent knowledge. A framework is proposed that allows computational agents to: (1) explore the threshold space for an optimal analysis of the drawing, (2) control information gain through agent invocation, (3) incorporate and communicate knowledge, and (4) inform the software engineering and system development with deep knowledge of the relationships between modules and their parameters (at least in a statistical sense)

Discrete Mereotopology

PublishedWhereas mereology, in the strict sense, is concerned solely with the part–whole relation, mereotopology extends mereology by including also the notion of connection, enabling one to distinguish, for example, between internal and peripheral parts, and between contact and separation. Mereotopology has been developed particularly within the Qualitative Spatial Reasoning research community, where it has been applied to, amongst other areas, geographical information science and image analysis. Most research in mereotopology has assumed that the entities being studied may be subdivided without limit, but a number of researchers have investigated mereotopological structures based on discrete spaces in which entities are built up from atomic elements that are not themselves subdivisible. This chapter presents an introductory treatment of mereotopology and its discrete variant, and provides references for readers interested in pursuing this subject in further detail

Ontologies for Plane, Polygonal Mereotopology

Several authors have suggested that a more parsimonious and conceptually elegant treatment of everyday mereological and topological reasoning can be obtained by adopting a spatial ontology in which regions, not points, are the primitive entities. This paper challenges this suggestion for mereotopological reasoning in 2-dimensional space. Our strategy is to define a mereotopological language together with a familiar, point-based interpretation. It is proposed that, to be practically useful, any alternative region-based spatial ontology must support the same sentences in our language as this familiar interpretation. This proposal has the merit of transforming a vague, open-ended question about ontologies for "practical" mereotopological reasoning into a precise question in model theory. We show that (a version of) the familiar interpretation is countable and atomic, and therefore prime. We conclude that useful alternative ontologies of the plane are, if anything, less parsimonious than the one which they are supposed to replace

Ontologies for plane, polygonal mereotopology

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