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From: boley@informatik.uni-kl.de (Harold Boley)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.shells
Subject: Environmental shells
Message-ID: <8435@uklirb.UUCP>
Date: 2 Feb 90 11:10:46 GMT
Sender: shell@uklirb.UUCP
Organization: University of Kaiserslautern, W-Germany
Lines: 32
Approved: shell@uklirb.uucp
Posted-Date: Sat Feb  3 13:40:43 GMT 1990

What tools for building environmental expert systems are available or
under development? They should support qualitative and modeling tasks
in (large-scale)

* data interpretation
* process diagnosis,
* trend extrapolation,
* design/configuration,
* consultation & training,

in ecologically relevant domains such as

* natural resources,
* power supply,
* meteorological effects,
* population development.

Ecological ES shells should also permit careful interfacing to
corresponding conventional tools (e.g. database, simulation,
statistics, decision-support, and networking systems). They should
help assembling the knowledge of environmental experts for extracting
the ecological essence from large amounts of data and suggesting
possible actions. Because of the brittleness of (present) AI
technology and the complexity of our ecological system, an
environmental ES should only assist human decision makers, not try to
intervene directly into environmental processes. Therefore,
appropriate shells should (re)present knowledge bases in a
well-structured manner, explain inference chains in a clear fashion,
and make explicit missing information, possible errors, multiple
alternatives, and decision tradeoffs.

Standard Disclaimer, Harold Boley.