Knowledge Discovery in Databases: An Overview

Abstract

Topoi are gradual inference rules, often used by experts in several problem classes: they can be exploited at various phases of a knowledge-based system life cycle. They can be studied at the two levels distinguished by Newelh the knowledge level and the symbol level. Some knowledge elicitation techniques such as rating grids and some knowledge acquisition methods such as KADS and KOD can be exploited in order to facilitate the acquisition of topoi. At the symbol level, different representations and implementations of topoi can be proposed and topoi can be formalized through several qualitative physics formalisms.