Applications of object-oriented approaches to expert systems in the earth sciences

Combining object and rule processing in knowledge-based systems provides a firm foundation for addressing more complex problems, such as planning, scheduling, resource allocation, and configuration. The features of object-oriented analysis, design, and knowledge representation advantageous to current expert system applications are abstraction, encapsulation, and hierarchy. Examples of object-oriented expert systems in the earth sciences at the US Geological Survey are a knowledge-based geographic information system (GIS), an integrated GIS and expert system, an enhanced digital line graph (DLG-E) extraction advisor, and a sedimentary basin analysis system.<>