thadani@CIS.OHIO-STATE.EDU (Sunil Thadani) (09/13/90)
:REQUIREMENTS we are looking for a representation system to encode knowledge about physical devices. Specifically we are currently looking at electrical domain and would like to create a knowldge base containing information about: (1) general laws of electricity (like ohms law), (2) general concepts in electrical domain (like what is meant by a closed circuit, what is a shot), (3) general knowledge about frequently encountered circuits (like their topology, how to analyse these circuits, how these circuits might fail), (4) and knowledge about specific electrical devices (like buzzer). Idea is that while reasoning about a specific buzzer, the system should be able to "inherit/acquire" and "use" the required information (general concepts in electrical domain or general knowledge about circuits etc) from 1, 2 and 3 above which is not explicitly encoded for each specific device in (4). So the representation system must support a mechanism for doing this. :REQUEST Any pointers to existing representation systems that look suitable for this, or to any pre-existing knowledge bases having similar features, would be greatly appriciated. Sunil thadani@cis.ohio-state.edu