VIDES: an expert system for visually identifying microfossils

The design of a visual identification expert system (VIDES) that uses a visual approach to help identify microfossils down to the species level is discussed. VIDES combines a graphical expert-system shell with a set of knowledge bases to help identify microfossils, reducing the time and cost associated with petroleum exploration. VIDES's initial knowledge-acquisition procedure, automated knowledge acquisition, textual and visual knowledge representation, automatic knowledge-base generation, inference mechanism and graphical interface are described.<>