0.1 Computer History Expert System (CHESt)

Abstract

The E-Librarian Service CHESt stands for Computer History expert system and was developed in 2004. The tool has a knowledge base with 300 multime-dia clips in German language that cover the main events in computer history. The clips were recorded with tele-TASK 1 at the University of Trier. The MIR module was implemented in Java. The user can access the search engine via a Windows application developed in Delphi, as depicted in figure 10.1. CHESt is based on a complete distributed architecture; the semantic search engine, the knowledge base, and the user application can be on dif-ferent machines. The communication is transparent and is done using socket connections. Pellet 2 [SP04] was used as external reasoner. CHESt exists in different configurations. It turned out that the following two were the most suitable. Fig. 10.1. CHESt with the question: " Who invented the transistor? " • The search engine was installed on a server in a wired network, and each user had a local copy of the client application. The knowledge base was accessed via a streaming server. This configuration is the most secure one, because nobody has direct access to the clips and to the search engine. The quality and performance of the network play a key role in the reliabil-ity of this configuration because the streaming of the videos can produce congestion problems. • All components are on the user's machine. CHESt fits on one CD-ROM, including the knowledge base, the search engine, and the client application. This configuration has the highest reliability and performance and gener-ates no network traffic. Its disadvantage is that everyone has direct access to the application and the knowledge base and could make unauthorized copies.