Ontologies in Support of Problem Solving

Abstract

M-Solving Methods, because they provide reusable reasoning components that participate in the principled construction of knowledge-based applications. 1.1 Reasoning on Domain Knowledge There is a number of ways in which reasoning can be performed on domain knowledge. At the simplest, a set of logical axioms or rules can complement an ontology to specify the way in which new facts can be derived from existing facts. A general inference engine then can draw conclusions based on these rules or axioms to create new knowledge and eventually to solve some simple problem. Although it did not include an explicit domain ontology, a typical example of a rule-based system is the Mycin medical-diagnosis system 4. Mycin involved a base of rules about symptoms, medical conditions and laboratory test results and their possible association with infections by micro-organisms. Such rules and axioms are specific to a domain. More problematically, rules often embed implicit procedural knowledge (such