Towards an integrated discovery system
Bernd Nordhausen, Pat Langley · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 1987
Previous discovery systems have successfully rediscovered known scientific laws. However, they have addressed only limited parts of the empirical discovery task. In this paper we introduce an integrated discovery system (IDS) which addresses many issues of empirical discovery. IDS operates in three stages: taxonomy formation, qualitative discovery, and quantitative discovery. We focus on the latter two stages introducing qualitative schemas as a means for representing qualitative discovery and showing how they can be learned by observation. IDS uses qualitative schemas to find quantitative laws. The implemented system has discovered intrinsic properties, such as the melting point of substances, and numeric laws, such as the conservation of mass of an object going through a phase change. 1