The Ontology of Tasks and Methods
Bharath Chandrasekaran, John R. Josephson · 1997
. Much of the work on ontologies in AI has focused on describing some aspect of reality: objects, relations, states of affairs, events, and processes in the world. A goal is to make knowledge sharable, by encoding domain knowledge using a standard vocabulary based on the ontology. A parallel attempt at identifying the ontology of problem-solving knowledge has a goal of sharable problem-solving methods. For example, when one is dealing with abductive inference problems, the following are some of the terms that occur in the representation of problem-solving methods: hypotheses, explanatory coverage, evidence, likelihood, plausibility, composite hypothesis, etc. Method ontology is, in good part, goal- and method-specific. Generic Tasks," Heuristic Classification," Task-specific Architectures," Task-method Structures," Inference Structures" and Task Structures" are representative bodies of work in the knowledge-systems area that have focused on domainindependent problem-solving methods. Ho...