Designing an inference engine: from ontology to control

The author has proposed a method called ontological analysis to help beginning knowledge engineers identify and formalize the core concepts of the task under study. Ontological analysis begins with the construction of a semantic grammar that captures regular features of the expert articulations. From the grammar, a more rigorous analysis proceeds to define the knowledge structures and the primitive fragments of the inference engine using domain equations as a formal notation tool. The author develops a method for proceeding from an identification of the knowledge structures to an inference strategy that exploits these knowledge structures to perform the task at hand. He introduces the techniques of analyzing expert articulations and organizing them into a semantic grammar; shows how this analysis can be formalized into domain equations and discusses the design of inference strategies based on the analysis of expert articulations. The task of trouble shooting an oscilloscope is used as an example to illustrate the methodology.<>