著者

柳沢 豊 塚本 昌彦 劉 渤江 西尾 章治郎

出版者

社団法人人工知能学会

雑誌

人工知能学会誌 (ISSN:09128085)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.10, no.5, pp.761-768, 1995-09-01

被引用文献数

6

---

Conventionally, the development of a knowledge application system has often been accompanied with the constraction of its underlying knowledge-base system. As a result, such a tight coupling of an application system with its employed knowledge-base system makes it difficult to share and reuse a knowledge-base among different applications. However, large scale knowledge-base should be shared by a wide variety of applications. The efficient share and reuse of knowledge-base among different applications is currently one of the most important research issues in building knowledge systems. Thus, it is important to establish the notion of knowledge-base independence among applications and knowledge-base systems. In this paper, this important notion is first defined by three types of independence : maintenance independence, program independence, and algorithm independence. Then, a dynamic inheritance deduction mechanism is proposed to achieve knowledge-base independence in the environment of object-oriented programming languages. The mechanism acts as the interface between the application and its knowledge-base system : if a message invokes a method, a query for the knowledge-base is automatically generated. The result of reasoning in the knowledge-base dynamically decides the class hieraechy (i.e., the inheritance relation) of the application. By doing so, a knowledge-base can be effectively utilized by different application systems without knowing the detailed structure, which realizes knowledge-base independence. We implemented the dynamic inheritance deduction mechanism using the Objective-C language and the DOT developed in our previous work for deductive and object-oriented extended term representation. Furthermore, based on the proposed mechanism, we constructed the enviroment DOT-ADE (DOT application development environment) for supporting application development.