Artificial
Intelligence

2.5.1 Design Time and Offline Computation

The knowledge base required for online computation can be built initially at design time and then augmented offline by the agent.

An ontology is a specification of the meaning of the symbols used in an information system. It specifies what is being modeled and the vocabulary used in the system. In the simplest case, if the agent is using explicit state-based representation with full observability, the ontology specifies the mapping between the world and the state. Without this mapping, the agent may know it is in, say, state 57, but, without the ontology, this information is just a meaningless number to another agent or person. In other cases, the ontology defines the features or the individuals and relationships. It is what is needed to convert raw sense data into something meaningful for the agent or to get meaningful input from a person or another knowledge source.

Ontologies are built by communities, often independently of a particular knowledge base or specific application. It is this shared vocabulary that allows for effective communication and interoperation of the data from multiple sources (sensors, humans, and databases). Ontologies for the case of individuals and relationships are discussed in Section 13.3.

The ontology logically comes before the data and the prior knowledge: we require an ontology to have data or to have knowledge. Without an ontology, data are just sequences of bits. Without an ontology, a human does not know what to input; it is the ontology that gives the data meaning. Often the ontology evolves as the system is being developed.

The ontology specifies a level or levels of abstraction. If the ontology changes, the data must change. For example, a robot may have an ontology of obstacles (e.g., every physical object is an obstacle to be avoided). If the ontology is expanded to differentiate people, chairs, tables, coffee mugs, and the like, different data about the world are required.

The knowledge base is typically built offline from a combination of expert knowledge and data. It is usually built before the agent knows the particulars of the environment in which it must act. Maintaining and tuning the knowledge base is often part of the online computation.

Offline, there are three major roles involved with a knowledge-based system:

• Software engineers build the inference engine and user interface. They typically know nothing about the contents of the knowledge base. They need not be experts in the use of the system they implement; however, they must be experts in the use of a programming language like Java, Lisp, or Prolog rather than in the knowledge representation language of the system they are designing.
• Domain experts are the people who have the appropriate prior knowledge about the domain. They know about the domain, but typically they know nothing about the particular case that may be under consideration. For example, a medical domain expert would know about diseases, symptoms, and how they interact but would not know the symptoms or the diseases of the particular patient. A delivery robot domain expert may know the sort of individuals that must be recognized, what the battery meter measures, and the costs associated with various actions. Domain experts typically do not know the particulars of the environment the agent would encounter - for example, the details of the patient for the diagnostic assistant or the details of the room a robot is in.

  Domain experts typically do not know about the internal workings of the AI system. Often they have only a semantic view of the knowledge and have no notion of the algorithms used by the inference engine. The system should interact with them in terms of the domain, not in terms of the steps of the computation. For example, it is unreasonable to expect that domain experts could debug a knowledge base if they were presented with traces of how an answer was produced. Thus, it is not appropriate to have debugging tools for domain experts that merely trace the execution of a program.

• Knowledge engineers design, build, and debug the knowledge base in consultation with domain experts. They know about the details of the system and about the domain through the domain expert. They know nothing about any particular case. They should know about useful inference techniques and how the complete system works.

The same people may fill multiple roles: A domain expert who knows about AI may act as a knowledge engineer; a knowledge engineer may be the same person who writes the system. A large system may have many different software engineers, knowledge engineers, and experts, each of whom may specialize in part of the system. These people may not even know they are part of the system; they may publish information for anyone to use.

Offline, the agent can combine the expert knowledge and the data. At this stage, the system can be tested and debugged. The agent is able to do computation that is not particular to the specific instance. For example, it can compile parts of the knowledge base to allow more efficient inference.