jdavis@gollum.UUCP (James P. Davis) (09/17/88)
I am looking for any pointers to references regarding the "systems engineering level" of knowledge as defined for knowledge base management systems (KBMS). The only reference I have is in Brodie et al. *On Knowledge Based Management Systems*, where Brachman and Levesque discuss the various levels associated with knowledge representation and knowledge systems (knowledge level, symbol level, organization level). They mention this Systems Engineering level in passing, but do not fully define it. Does anyone have any references, or is anyone doing work in this area of further defining these "levels" (Ron and Hector, are you out there)? The nature of my research in this area involves the definition of a "level" which allows structure and organization to be imposed on the Universe of Discourse (which doesn't conform to Newell's Knowledge Level, which deals specifically with what can be stated or implied about the world on a functional basis independent of organization or implementation). However, I am looking at this imposition of organization independent of how the knowledge schema is implemented or manipulated to carry out rational behavior (which doesn't confrom to Newell's Symbol Level either, which deals with issues of how rational behavior is realized on a machine, addressing such issues as how to exploit the syntactic properties of a representation technique to effectively produce rational actions, e.g., inheritance in frame systems). The perspective that I am approaching this from is based on the ideas from Database and data modeling involving the construction of an "enterprise model" of a domain, which is primarily a structural description (in some formalism such as any number of deviations of the E-R model which have been researched) that captures domain objects, relationships, and constraints according to some set of model-dependent wff's. This description is a declarative representation of the UoD. What I am looking at is the correlation between this process in database/data modeling and constructing knowledge schemas for a domain in AI. The goal is to define an architecture for the tight coupling of database and knowledge based systems as KBMS'. It seems that some of the work that I am doing at this level between the KNowledge and Symbol Levels (which I call the "Enterprise Level" may be what has been termed the "Systems Engineering" Level. Is this Systems Engineering Level defined sufficiently? Is anyone working on it? Are there references? Anyone want to correspond regarding these levels? Any and all responses are appreciated. jdavis@Gollum.Columbia.NCR.COM Jim Davis Advanced Systems Development NCR Corporation