Application of Defeasible Domain-Specific Knowledge to the Description of Gothic Cathedrals in the ARC Project

摘要

The goal of the Architecture Represented Computationally (ARC) project is to build a complete system by which user input or written descriptions of Gothic cathedrals are automatically represented logically, allowing validation consistency, query-answering, and the generation of precise textual or visual descriptions. This paper will briefly cover the first major step in the implementation of this system, which is the knowledge representation and inference engine, with particular focus on the meta-programming and non-monotonicity of the application. The meta-programming allows users to define terminology, add facts, and create constraints without the need to understand Prolog. The non-monotonic knowledge representation allows the user to create rules about general concepts and conflicting rules about subsets of those concepts, from which the correct results are inferred. This ability of the ARC systems allows the user to "overgeneralize and then except," which is a basic aspect of natural description.