Applying problem solving methods for process knowledge acquisition, representation, and reasoning

Abstract

In this paper we present an approach towards knowledge acquisition of process knowledge for the natural sciences. The work has been conducted within Project Halo, which is creating advanced knowledge authoring and question answering systems for the natural sciences. An analysis of AP®-level questions for Biology, Chemistry and Physics uncovered that process knowledge is the single most frequent type of knowledge required. Thus, we developed means to acquire process knowledge, to formally represent it, and to reason about it in order to answer novel questions about the domains. All these tasks are supported by an abstract process meta-model. It provides the terminology for user-tailored process diagrams, which are automatically translated into executable FLogic code. The meta-model and the code generation are based on the notion of Problem Solving Methods (PSM) which represent an abstract formalization of the reasoning strategies needed for processes. Copyright 2007 ACM.