ERNEST: A Semantic Network System for Pattern Understanding

Aktract-This paper gives a detailed account of a system environment for the treatment of general problems of image and speech understanding. It provides a framework for the representation of declarative and procedural knowledge based on a suitable definition of a semantic network. The syntax and semantics of the network are clearly defined. In addition, the pragmatics of the network in its use for pattern understanding is defined by several rules which are problem independent. This allows one to formulate problem-independent control algorithms. Complete software environments are available to handle the described structures. The general applicability of the network system is demonstrated by short descriptions of three applications from different task domains.