blog#3.4 knowlegde-based system

1.A knowledge-based system is a program for extending and querying a knowledge base.The Computer User High-Tech Dictionary defines a knowledge-based system as a computer system that is programmed to imitate human problem-solving by means of artificial intelligence and reference to a database of knowledge on a particular subject.


2.I distinguish the KBS from MIS that the knowledge-based system is just also one of the part ot Management Information System.And eventhough this must be part of process of solving a problem by artificial inteligence but it helps a lot in a certain company to solve problem.

3. Some examples of KBS:

a. Cyc is a very large and one of the example of KBS. It multi-contextual knowledge base and inference engine, the development of which started at the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) in Austin, Texas during the early 1980s. Over the past eleven years the members of the Cyc team, lead by Doug Lenat, have added to the knowledge base a huge amount of fundamental human knowledge: facts, rules of thumb, and heuristics for reasoning about the objects and events of modern everyday life.

A Company who has KBS can be more compepitive because it has software that attempts to reproduce the performance of one or more human experts, most commonly in a specific problem domain, and is a traditional application and subfield of artificial intelligence. A wide variety of methods can be used to simulate the performance of the expert however common to most or all are the creation of a so-called "knowledgebase" which uses some knowledge representation formalism to capture the subject matter experts (SME) knowledge and a process of gathering that knowledge from the SME and codifying it according to the formalism, which is called knowledge engineering. Expert systems may or may not have learning components but a third common element is that once the system is developed it is proven by being placed in the same real world problem solving situation as the human SME, typically as an aid to human workers or a supplement to some information system.
As a premiere application of computing and artificial intelligence, the topic of expert systems has many points of contact with general systems theory, operations research, business process reengineering and various topics in applied mathematics and management science.
Two illustrations of actual expert systems can give an idea of how they work. In one real world case at a chemical refinery a senior employee was about to retire and the company was concerned that the loss of his expertise in managing a fractionating tower would severely impact operations of the plant. A knowledge engineer was assigned to produce an expert system reproducing his expertise saving the company the loss of the valued knowledge asset. Similarly a system called Mycin was developed from the expertise of best diagnosticians of bacterial infections whose performance was found to be as good or better than the average clinician. An early commercial success and illustration of another typical application was an expert system fielded by DEC in the 1980s to quality check the configurations of their computers prior to delivery. The eighties were the time of greatest popularity of expert systems and interest lagged after the onset of the AI Winter.




http.cyc.com
knowlegdebased.net